Below, in our article, we note that many of Lichtman’s “keys” are now turning against Obama locking him out of a second term. Lichtman better button his pockets because it’s possible another “key” is dropping down the drain. Lichtman’s fourth key is “There is no significant third party challenge.”

And Lichtman, after Arkansas, Kentucky, West Virginia, North Carolina, etc. you should consider the growing talk from many who see the entire party flushed down the drain with Obama at the top of the ticket wondering Will Obama Pull an LBJ and Drop Out?

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The reaction from Hopium Guzzlers to Tuesday’s latest “get lost Barack” from the voters was “Ignore the voters…. yeah, that’s the ticket…. ignore the voters.” Get your whistles out Obama Hopium Guzzlers, there’s a cemetery ahead.

Last night in Clinton country Arkansas the voters supposedly in his own party expressly went out to vote in an act of sheer defiance and gave an unknown (John Wolfe) 41.6 percent of the vote. In Kentucky 42.1 percent wanted the “uncommitted” unknown rather than Barack Obama. In Harlen Knott County (“the heart of coal country”, as Sean Trende explains) Obama only got 26.2 percent of his own party’s vote. Add these results to Obama losing 40.6 percent of the West Virginia vote to an imprisoned inmate in Texas; 21 percent of the vote in must win North Carolina, 24 percent in Louisiana, 19 percent in Alabama, and 43 percent of the vote in Oklahoma.

“To be clear, with the exception of North Carolina, none of these states is in play. [snip]

But there are three ways in which these states really do matter.

1) This is beginning to function as an unprecedented primary challenge to Obama.

Using my handy “C.Q. Guide to U.S. Elections,” I went back to the birth of presidential primaries in 1912. There are only six sitting presidents who have ever received less than 60 percent of the vote in any primary: Taft in ’12; Coolidge, ’24; Hoover, ’32; LBJ, ’68; Carter, ’80; and Bush ’92. All of these presidents, with the exception of Coolidge, were not re-elected — and he eventually faced a substantial third-party challenge from one of his primary challengers.

Moreover, consider the men who brought these challenges: former President Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, Sen. Bob LaFollette in 1924, Sen. Joseph France of Maryland in 1932, Sen. Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Sen. Ted Kennedy in 1980, and TV commentator Pat Buchanan in 1992. Obviously the quality here varies substantially, but all of these upstarts began with a much stronger national profile than Keith Judd or John Wolfe.

I think we can reasonably begin to view this as a sort of organic primary challenge to Obama, which runs strongly in the Southern and border states. Obama’s not likely to lose any states in the primaries; think of this more like Buchanan’s run against George H.W. Bush in 1992.

This is only relevant because a lot of people attribute some significance to the fact that Obama, unlike the other presidents who lost in postwar America, has avoided a substantial primary challenge. I’ve always been skeptical that this is the proper metric. Primary challenges strike me as a symptom, not a cause, of presidential weakness. Just as diseases can be present without all symptoms, presidential weakness can be present without a primary challenge. And, as always, we should be skeptical when making judgments on the basis of a fairly small number of observations.

But if you do attribute substantial importance to the lack of a primary challenge to the president, then I think you must re-evaluate, especially when you consider the weakness of his primary opponents.”

Trende is referring to Alan Lichtman’s “13 Keys” to the White House which have proved to be formidable predictors of presidential election results. Lichtman predicted in 2011 that Obama would be reelected in 2012. Sean Trende strongly suggests that Lichtman reconsider his foolish projection.

“Working for the president are several of Lichtman’s keys, tops among them incumbency and the scandal-free nature of his administration. [snip]

Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.[snip]

Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy. [snip]

Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.[snip]

Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal. “This administration has been squeaky clean. There’s nothing on scandal,” says Lichtman. [snip]

Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs. Says Lichtman, “We haven’t seen any major failure that resembles something like the Bay of Pigs and don’t foresee anything.”

Scandal free???? Um.. this requires a whole lot of revision. Ignore Fast n’ Furious, Solyndra, the lobbyists, the waste fraud and abuse of the election slush fund called “the stimulus” and Lichtman drops a key.

The stimulus has been a bust and hated. The Obama health fraud law is hated and might not exist after June 28. Lichtman better grab a flashlight because the “policy change” key fell into the sewers.

Social unrest? Anyone been to Chicago lately?

Foreign/military failure? Look to the results of the Egyptian election and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood along with the already high and getting higher hatred against the United States. Who Lost Egypt?

And of course, it depends on what the meaning of “serious” is to they key about a primary challenger. Are voters coming out with little prodding from the opposition to vote against a president “serious” enough for Lichtman? Are voters from his own party bothering to go to the polls with apparently no other purpose than to slap the president’s smug face a “serious” challenge?

Check your pockets Lichtman you haven’t got a clue key. By Lichtman’s own measure the keys are turning against Obama.

What we’re really talking about here, and as I explored in great detail in “The Lost Majority,” is “Greater Appalachia,” an area that was settled by Scots-Irish immigrants in the late 18th century and that has retained an attachment to Jacksonian populism since then. This region begins in western Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina, stretches through the Appalachians and across the Cumberland Plateau, and spills over into southern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, across Missouri and Arkansas, and into north Texas and Oklahoma. It also brushes along the northern edges of Mississippi and Alabama.

Now, no one expects West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kentucky to be a part of Obama’s coalition this fall. But lots of people are looking at Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. These states are where this primary weakness becomes potentially significant.

All four of those states have substantial populations in areas geographically and culturally similar to these “problem areas”: southwestern Pennsylvania, western Virginia and North Carolina, and southeastern Ohio. In all of these states, Obama’s path to victory is to hold down his losses in rural areas, and then maximize his vote among upscale and minority voters in urban areas.

In 2008 this strategy worked well, in large part because the financial collapse produced a large turnaround in the voting preferences of whites without college degrees. He still performed relatively poorly for a Democrat among these voters, but his margins were enough to enable him to capture these four states. If he’s facing a virtual rebellion among rural white Democrats (and presumably a similar problem with independents) this time around, his odds of capturing these four states diminish appreciably. Once again, this isn’t to say that he will necessarily lose, just that his path to re-election narrows if Romney is racking up big wins in the 11th District of North Carolina, or in the old 6th District of Ohio.”

The Hopium Guzzlers say not to worry. Joe Biden is on the job. Remember, Joe is Obama’s ambassador to the bitter and the clingy. But don’t put away your whistles Obama dopes:

“Joe Biden may not be much help to Barack Obama in key swing states this fall.

In a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, Americans split on whether they like or dislike the vice president – 42% said they had a favorable opinion, 45% said unfavorable – but the numbers are worse in key swing states.

In the 12 swing states likely to determine the outcome of the presidential election, only 40% of registered voters view Biden favorably, while 54% view him unfavorably. [snip]

Independents are also down on the VP, with 50% saying they view him unfavorably and 35% holding a favorable view. [snip]

Biden is more on par with Dick Cheney, who stood at 46% favorable, 42% unfavorable in a July 2004 USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll.”

Yeah, Biden… that’s the ticket in swing states.

Sean Trende’s third reason for why Tuesday’s primary results matter track with our long series Mistake In ’08:

In short, the Democratic Party committed suicide when it dumped the FDR Coalition led by Hillary Clinton in favor of the Barack Obama Situation Comedy coalition.

Ruy Teixiera has been aided and abetted in his toxic theories by books that deride “Bubba” such as the dangerous and idiotic “What’s The Matter With Kansas?” Books such as the Kansas book provided “theorists” from the left a “we’re smarter” snob attitude and justification for a class based hatred of poor whites.“

Judis and Teixeira appropriately note that their predictions are conditional on a number of contingencies, but this is not an insignificant shift. The three Mountain West states — four if we are generous and include Arizona — comprise a total of 31 electoral votes and contain 23 House seats. Our states in Greater Appalachia comprise 47 electoral votes and contain 35 House seats, plus another 10 or so House seats in neighboring areas. In other words, by ceding these core Jacksonian states to the Republicans, Democrats are ceding about 20 percent of the House seats needed for a majority in exchange for 10 percent of the House seats needed for a majority. [snip]

Of the 63 seats Republicans picked up in 2010, 15 were in Greater Appalachia. Without these seats, their majority would be much slimmer, and Democrats would be only 10 seats from a majority, rather than 25. Many of these seats represent districts that Bill Clinton had been competitive in during the 1996 elections, but which have slipped away from his party since as the Democrats have become increasingly liberal, urban and culturally cosmopolitan.

This is the real reason Tuesday night’s results are significant. I actually don’t think these voters are complete lost causes for the Democratic Party — Republicans should be trembling at the prospect of a true populist like Brian Schweitzer of Montana running against Romney in 2016. But they do seem to be rejecting the Democratic standard-bearer for now. Given the sizable number of potential electoral votes at stake, this is not small potatoes. And the potential obstacles posed to Democratic attempts to take back the House stemming from this weakness are both real and substantial.”

Angry unions, ugly scandals, protesters, and the new gay-marriage ban could make for an ugly backdrop, writes Matt Taylor. [snip]

But while polls show Barack Obama and Mitt Romney neck-and-neck in the state, the president’s choice to hold the convention there could come back to haunt him, given the convergence of angry labor unions, an unfortunately named venue, embarrassing local political scandals, Occupy Wall Street protesters, and the voters’ decision this year to pass a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and civil unions.

Democrats will be deciding whether or not to add a party plank in line with Obama’s personal declaration in support of gay marriage, which came just days after North Carolinians voted overwhelmingly against it. That vote led more than 30,000 people to quickly sign a petition from a New York–based marriage-equality group to move the convention elsewhere, though timing and logistics alone render that functionally impossible. [snip]

But the economic backdrop is far from ideal for the president looking to sell voters on the Obama recovery. North Carolina’s unemployment rate has persistently been above the national average, at 9.4 percent last month, and Charlotte is the world headquarters of Bank of America, a bailed-out megabank so closely associated with the financial collapse of 2008 that Occupy Wall Street has devoted a campaign specifically to breaking it up. Protesters will be on the streets of Charlotte taking aim at the bank even as President Obama delivers his acceptance speech—at Bank of America Stadium. And labor unions are fuming that the convention is being held in a so-called right-to-work state (where union membership or dues cannot be required for employment). [snip]

Labor, which remains the bedrock organizing arm of the Democratic Party, is miffed that national Democrats chose to meet in the state with the smallest proportion of union members—just 2.9 percent of the workforce last year—to make their case for a strengthening the middle class and broadening economic prosperity. Some locals are planning to skip or even protest the convention, and labor has pointedly declined to contribute its expected share of the convention’s costs, which will be upwards of $36 million this year. [snip]

And that run of bad news for Democrats seems likely to continue through September. After the state seemed to shift toward the party with Obama’s historic win in 2008, Republicans just two years later took control of the state legislature for the first time since the 19th century, and the first-term Democratic governor, Bev Perdue, is retiring in the face of polls showing she would have no chance at winning reelection.

Compounding the Democrats’ branding troubles in the Tar Heel State are two sex scandals involving former party political stars—the trial of former senator John Edwards, John F. Kerry’s vice presidential running mate in 2004 and the most outspoken populist in the 2008 presidential primary, and the ongoing investigation of the state party chair, David Parker, for bungling his own inquiry into whether his executive director sexually harassed an employee. After briefly resigning, Parker has returned to his office and is fighting to keep it. He may well still be there and fighting when the convention arrives.

“When North Carolina was picked, it was an excellent choice,” said election expert Larry J. Sabato of the University of Virginia. “As it has happened, North Carolina is going to be less competitive. [Democrats are] less inclined to admit the state is already gone, but it probably is, unless there’s a big Obama resurgence in the fall. They’ve got a very high unemployment rate.”

President Obama was in Denver this afternoon for a fundraiser. But the event does not appear to have been quite the success the campaign was hoping for.

According to today’s White House pooler, the New York Times’s Peter Baker, “The crowd was obviously supportive and glad to see him, though the room at times felt a little flat and Potus seemed a little tired after a long day that’s not even close to being over.” (The president has two more fundraisers tonight in Los Angeles.)

Moreover, the campaign announced that the president “[would] headline a reception for 700 at the Hyatt Regency Denver at the Colorado Convention Center. General admission tickets started at $500 apiece, though a selected number of Gen44 and Grassroots tickets were available for $250.”

The campaign now says, according to the pooler, that only 550 people showed up.

And when the president showed up at the site of the Denver fundraiser, he was met with protesters. The pooler reports:

a couple dozen protesters held up signs like, “Out of Hope, Ready for Change,” “Debt Slavery,” “Obama’s Blvd. of Broken Promises” and “Bye Bye on Nov. 6th.” Some of them were calling out something that your pooler couldn’t hear. They were kept behind a yellow police tape far out of view of Potus or his donors.

admin: I have always regarded Professor Lichman as the prototypical absent minded professor. I got his book about the 13 keys when it first came out, read about 20% of it and threw it away. It is the same kind of nonsense we see in our judicial system, where instead of a bright line, we get these 10 part balancing tests to determine legal outcomes. This quasi scientific approach is supposed to predict presidential outcomes, but how he assesses each of those items is entirely subjective, and he gives us no guidelines to determine how each of those keys should be weighted. I prefer the much simpler more direct sort of criterion–in bad economic times it is the economy stupid. Remember this is not what matters to the prescious beltway elites or the effete snobs who are finanacially insulated from the consequences of their stupidity, but the millions of invisible Americans who work hard and are still living on the ragged edge–the people whom the party of Obama are indifferent to at best and contemptuous of at worse. The 13 keys are a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury and predictive of nothing.

potus seemed a little tired?
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His petty fatigue is as nothing compared to the exaustion, angst and outrage which the rest of us feel as we watch the future of this nation go down the sink due to his actions. In that limited (or unlimited) sense he is indeed “The One”–so reads the indictment.

Lichman should get the Holland Keating award. Keating is the fraudulent pollster at CNN. When asked what is 2=2? each would answer whatever you want it to be. And each has a quasi scientific system to determine an outcome, but the rule of garbage in garbage out is always hiding somewhere in their caluclations. There is a fine word for this: charlatans.

There must be some scientific reason why so many of these charlatans are partial to bow ties. Since meersham pipes are frowned upon and tweed jackets are no longer in vogue, perhaps that is the only smokescreen they have left–or the only fig leaf–to throw the hounds off the scent so to speak. I must remember to ask EJ Dione should it be my misfortune to ever cross his path. I am certain he would have a personal opinion on this.

The Obama reelection campaign is heavily focused on younger voters. But it needs to take a careful look at the other end of the age spectrum: voters 65 and older, particularly white seniors.

This was President Barack Obama’s weakest demographic in 2008. It could spell trouble for him in a close election, where white seniors are concentrated in swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa and Nevada.

Middle-class white seniors, who rely on income from savings to supplement Social Security and pensions, are particularly sensitive to changes in interest rates on CDs and money market accounts. And those interest rates have gone subterranean.

Obama already starts at a disadvantage with this part of the electorate, which constituted 16 percent of the vote in 2008, according to a study by Democracy Corps. It showed that Democratic presidential nominees’ share of the white senior vote has been on a steady decline. Vice President Al Gore won 46 percent in 2000, Sen. John Kerry had 44 percent in 2004 and Obama got just 40 percent in 2008.

Like many middle-class seniors, my wife and I have money in CDs and money market accounts. Our largest CD renewed at an annual rate of 0.55 percent . Yes that’s right — less than 1 percent. The bank at which we do business quotes a money market interest rate of 0.3 percent.

We still plan on voting for Obama this fall. But don’t be surprised if other seniors enter the voting booth in November with an angry look in their eyes.

I recall how seniors would come to my congressional town hall meetings to complain about the decline in their standard of living the last time interest rates were low. I was surprised. I had thought the public would be happy with lower interest rates, since it makes it easier to finance a house or a car. But seniors instead gave me an earful about how lower interest rates just aren’t good for everyone.

Obama cannot ignore these concerns, and he must have some answers ready. This part of the electorate, as a percentage of those eligible to vote, outperforms every other age group. And right now they feel threatened. Their angst will grow even deeper if the stock market drops significantly, lowering the value of their 401(k) and IRA accounts — another major source of retirement income for seniors. [snip]

Obama has strong appeal to younger voters. But that may not be enough if the negative trend among seniors continues in 2012. To win, you have to be able to fight a multi-front war.

Attention needs to be paid to both ends of the age spectrum.

Martin Frost served in the House from Texas, 1979 to 2005, and was Democratic Caucus chairman and head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He is now an attorney with Polsinelli Shughart.

If Walker has his way, management of State resources, including deer hunting, will fall to private corporations.
[….]
As reported in Lodi Valley News, Walker has hired Texan Dr. James Kroll to serve as Wisconsin’s “deer czar,” a position that gives Kroll considerable power over Wisconsin’s deer management policy. Kroll is an outspoken proponent of game farms, and an opponent of public lands and public game management, which he is on record as describing as “the last bastion of communism.”

The public lands Kroll despises include the state parks, state and national forests, and other publicly held property that hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites—particularly in the northern part of the state—rely on for deer hunting. Hunters on public land may be surprised to discover that Walker regards their annual trek into a state forest as a radical left wing activity akin to marching in a May Day parade in Red Square. But so it is.

If Kroll gets his way, public land hunters will get the shaft. The deer herd no longer would be managed as a public resource, but as the private property of wealthy landowners. Wisconsin will become like Europe, where hunting is the privilege of the wealthy.

Kroll’s view fit in nicely with those of DNR secretary Cathy Stepp, a Walker appointee who already has suggested that public lands be sold.

admin, thanks for continuing educational opportunities/hope for the Republic which you offer.
I see where there is now a month dedicated to Asian heritage. Increasingly the need for an American history month becomes apparent.

The other day we learned that whites account for less than half of births in this country. Sure hope that means that the various ethnicities are going to provide the funds I expect when I go on the dole with those SNAP, cell phone and other gov’t services.

Yesterday the huge but capable conglomerate which is employs my healthcare providers emailed me to say they’d be collecting my info about race, ethnicity, primary language, and email address at my next visit. This is in compliance with HHS. Currently I may refuse to reveal the info.
My visit to the doctor’s office last week brought other changes. “They” are using a new computer system which has a good beginning. Upon providing my check-in info, it spits out an invoice for me to hand to the doctor when my visit begins. I like that. Used to be there was no paper trail at all. But I was very early, so had time to go over that invoice. There is an unwelcome disclaimer at the bottom: “I have been notified that my insurer may deny payment for the service identified above. If the insurer denies payment, I agree to be personally and fully responsible for payment.” Ironic because the SIL had just told me how providers doing the work have to accept whatever Medicare offers; you might need to press them some, but they are obligated. Obviously my SIL does not yet know about this. OK. A lot of rambling, and it’s over.

I came here to say “Good on Mitt!” Seems Oh dropped some garbage last after last campaign and Mitt says he’s picking it up. I like the strategy:
In the fall of 2008, 216 District of Columbia low-income students were notified by the United States Department of Education that they had been selected to receive scholarships to attend the school of their choice. No longer would they have to worry about violence and other distractions at school. They were about to be given the same opportunity President Obama had when he was given a scholarship to attend an elite private school in Hawaii.
But then Obama was elected president with the help of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. One of his first acts as President of the United States was to send letters to these 216 kids informing them that their scholarships were being revoked. They would not be attending the school of their choice. To product teacher union jobs and union dues, they would have to attend the crime filled schools in their neighborhood.
Yesterday, at the Latino Coalition economic summit in Washington, D.C., Mitt Romney called improving education “the civil rights issue of our era, and it’s the greatest challenge of our time.” And he released a policy paper promising to restore and expand the very scholarships that Obama took away. “A Romney Administration will expand the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, offering more students a chance to attend a better school and providing a model of parental choice for the nation,” the paper promised….http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/morning-examiner-real-civil-rights-issue/560731

“Wisconsin will become like Europe, where hunting is the privilege of the wealthy.”
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Here we go with the fantasized images of Europe again. There is not much game hunting in Europe, but that does not mean it is for the elite. The game hunters I have known have all been country folk, peasants or technicians, and they shoot small game like rabbits. Any rich European who likes game hunting will go for big game in Africa, Australia, Latin America or the US.

“Sarah is becoming increasingly relevant within my corner of the world. Why do I say that?

It is because WPIX out of NYC must recently have received a phone call from the WH/Axlegrease combine, and criticism of the ruling party is no longer permitted at that transmitter.

The change is so sudden as to have placed me in shock. Already this morning they’ve broadcast their SP hit piece.

It began with a clip of John McCain defending SP’s qualifications when he chose her for VP. [Why was that news today, anyway?????]

It ended with Tamsen Fadel stating that SP has turned into nothing more than a reality show entity and political pundit. I do understand that they are running scared over SP’s influence, but the depths to which so many will sink to prop up the boob is discouraging.

I’d fire some of this info back at them but WPIX has recently been blocking my tweets. We used to have a good relationship. sigh.
…………

Could someone familiar w/ WPIX #hashtag post it here? I think we can check it out and see what their problem is…

The federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes monthly tallies for the employment-population ratio. That stat shows something rather straightforward: Among those who are living in America and are free to pursue employment, what percentage are employed? (The bureau excludes those who are under 16 years old, are active-duty military, or are — in the bureau’s own words — “inmates of institutions (for example, penal and mental facilities, homes for the aged),” from its tallies.)
Barack Obama

Over the past quarter of a century (a total of 300 months), dating back to May 1987 and the Reagan administration, here are the 30 worst months (that is, the bottom 10 percent) for the employment-population ratio, along with the president who happened to be in office at that particular time (scroll down to the see the list):
Related Stories

Interestingly, the 30 (or 32, including ties) worst months for employment in the past 25 years have all come after the most recent recession ended, in June 2009. In other words, they’ve all come during the Obama “recovery.”

What’s more, under every other president during the past 25 years (spanning from the later stages of the Reagan presidency through the entire George W. Bush presidency), the employment-population ratio was always over 60 percent — every single month, for 260 consecutive months. In vivid contrast, with the exception of the month in which he took office (January 2009) and his first full month in office (February 2009), the employment-population ratio under Obama has always been under 60 percent — every single month, for 38 consecutive months. (For 32 consecutive months — from September 2009 to the present day — it’s been under 59 percent.)

In fact, the worst non-Obama month in the past 25 years was December 2008, when the employment-population ratio was 61.0 percent under George W. Bush. Comparatively, Obama’s best month to date (not counting January 2009, when he entered midstream) was his first, February 2009, when the employment-population ratio was 60.3 percent. In other words, over the past 25 years, the worst month under any other president has beaten the best month under Obama.

Admin: this is from Stephen Green who did the electoral college analysis which I posted yesterday. Incidentally, Rove has a piece on that same subject in today’s Wall Street Journal which presents a somewhat more complex picture of the changing landscape, but claims the odds now favor Romeny. I do not think it is as close as they think, based on the Morris analylsis. Let us hope that is not simply wishful thinking, and Green’s comments (below) explain why I say that. For the centrist wing of the party to regain standing and ultimately control of the party a blow-out loss for Obama and a sober reassessment are necessary. Here’s Green–on both parties . . .
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Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s off-message criticism of the Obama campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s background at Bain Capital gave the campaign an untimely, unwanted headache this week. But more significantly, it exposed a tension that’s developing between the Democratic Party’s centrist wing and its more-outspoken liberal base—one that threatens to fester more openly if President Obama fails to win a second term.

These things take time, too. The GOP is still in the process of getting over “compassionate conservatism.” First came the shock — to the GOP leadership that is — of the drubbing the party received in the 2006 midterms. In 2008, the Democrats managed a repeat, in large part because the GOP hadn’t yet had the chance to purge itself.

Well, 2010 Tea Party election helped that process along quite a bit, and left the Democrats just as shocked as the GOP establishment had been four years earlier. But the Republicans have a ways to go. Should Romney win in November, it will hinge on how he governs. If he’s another Bush 43 (or, hell, Bush 41), then the GOP Civil Wars will continue. If he leans more to the right, the fighting can stop for a while.

If he loses — then things get really nasty. Can you say “Whigs?” I knew you could.

The Democrats watch all this, loving every minute of it. But their worst days are yet to come. The national party is beholden to its Progressive wing, which has very little appeal outside of super-liberal enclaves. But the moderate wing of the national party more or less ceased to exist after 2010. Up-and-comers like Cory Booker should be the Democrats’ centrist salvation, but look at how quickly he got jerked back into line by the Progressive White House.

An Obama win this fall will only strengthen the Progressive more, while doing serious damage to the Democrats’ chances moving forward. An Obama loss? It might just make the GOP infighting look tame.

I can hardly wait.

But remember: Both parties are uneasy coalitions of disparate factions. It’s like that line from The Godfather. “That’s all right. These things gotta happen every five years or so, ten years. Helps to get rid of the bad blood. Been ten years since the last one.”

And, yeah, it’s been ten years since the Democrats had their Come to Jesus moment, when the Republicans actually picked up seats in the historic 2002 midterms. Their time might have come.

7 Comments
S.E. Cupp in Hustler?
May 23rd, 2012 – 11:50 amRemember, the real “War on Women” is being waged by the Left.

6 Comments
Required Viewing
May 23rd, 2012 – 10:18 amTrifecta: President Obama has been inserting himself into history, so it’s only fair that Bill, Scott, and I return the favor.

BONUS: Brilliant photoshops from Travis.

Comments
You Like Me! You Barely Like Me!
May 23rd, 2012 – 8:03 amDelicious:

Obama carried only 58% of the vote in yesterday’s Kentucky Democratic primary — against 42% for “uncommitted” delegates to the national convention; “uncommitted” actually out-polled the president in 67 of Kentucky’s 120 counties.

Obama also carried 58% in the Arkansas primary; little-known Tennessee lawyer and Occupy Wall Street supporter John Wolfe won 42% of the vote against the Democratic president in Arkansas.

Two weeks ago, a federal prisoner in Texas named Keith Judd racked up 41% of the vote against Obama in the West Virginia primary.

Positive spin: “Uncommitted” remains slightly more popular than “Federal Prisoner.”

Hope!

1 Comment
Wargaming the Electoral College
May 23rd, 2012 – 5:17 amWelcome to the official launch of this season’s Wargames. It’s way — way — too early to call this election either way, so instead we’re going to look at the changes since 2008, and the special challenges Mitt Romney faces. My maps are all courtesy of 270toWin‘s iPad app, which is a superior tool to their website. The maps are prettier, too.

First up, Team Obama is counting on at a 50/50 election, which looks OK to them. If you drop Obama down to 50% of the vote, from his 52.9% of four years ago, here’s what you get.

In this scenario, Romney picks off NC, IN, FL and NE’s second district. That’s a 290 to 248 victory for the President, or four better than what George W. Bush pulled off in 2004. Those of us who remember that election know that isn’t a whole lot of wiggle room, but it will do. Unless Romney implodes between now and then, this is probably Obama’s best-case scenario. Maybe he blames Bush.

There’s been talk on the Obama side of maybe picking up Arizona this year, but I haven’t heard much of that talk the last few weeks.

If Romney connects with voters while “his” 527s help make “Obama” a dirty word, he might manage a cozier win in the popular vote, with 51.5%. If we drop Obama down to the remainder, let’s what happens to the map. You might be in for a surprise — I know I was.

Last week PJM Interconnection, the company that operates the electric grid for 13 states (Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia) held its 2015 capacity auction. These are the first real, market prices that take Obama’s most recent anti-coal regulations into account, and they prove that he is keeping his 2008 campaign promise to make electricity prices “necessarily skyrocket.”

The market-clearing price for new 2015 capacity – almost all natural gas – was $136 per megawatt. That’s eight times higher than the price for 2012, which was just $16 per megawatt. In the mid-Atlantic area covering New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and DC the new price is $167 per megawatt. For the northern Ohio territory served by FirstEnergy, the price is a shocking $357 per megawatt.

1 Comment
Team Obama: Flushing Itself Down the Drain
May 22nd, 2012 – 12:34 pmHow’s that War on Capital going, Mr. President? Not too good, you say? Not even within your own party? Really? Really:

Booker is not the only Democrat to question the aggressive, negative portrayal of Romney’s work in private equity. Former Tennessee Rep. Harold Ford Jr. said today he agreed with “the substance” of Booker’s comments and “would not have backed out.”

“I agree with him, private equity is not a bad thing. Matter of fact, private equity is a good thing in many, many instances,” the Democrat said in a separate appearance on MSNBC earlier in the day.

Former Obama administration economic adviser Steven Rattner made similar comments last week, calling a new Obama campaign TV ad attacking Romney’s role in the bankruptcy of a Bain-owned steel company “unfair.”

And here’s former DNC Chairman and PA Governor Ed Rendell from another story:

And Rendell joined the chorus of criticism of Obama’s attacks on finance, whose leaders have written checks to many members of both parties.

“I think they’re very disappointing,” Rendell said of the ads attacking Bain. “I think Bain is fair game, because Romney has made it fair game. But I think how you examine it, the tone, what you say, is important as well.”

The War on Women, the Life of Julia, the War on Capital… they’ve even given Joe Biden extra lead on his leash. Others have called this campaign tone deaf, or accused Obama of having a tin ear. But it looks to me like there’s something deeper, something fundamentally wrong in the West Wing.

When a soldier in Vietnam wanted out, he might shoot himself in the foot on purpose. But what do you call it when somebody shoots himself in the foot, again and again, on accident? It beggars belief that a campaign crew that was firing on all cylinders against Hillary and then McCain just four years ago, could have become so incompetent. It’s not as if Romney is a stellar candidate with a whirlwind of popular support, causing Team Obama to make all these unforced errors. No, they just keep putting up loser after loser. Axelrod’s crew can’t even maintain control of their own lame hashtag games on Twitter.

It’s almost as if there is something psychologically mixed up about the Obama campaign, a willful streak of self-destruction. They’re running a race based on public tantrums, like a messed-up emo kid who cuts his flesh or pulls his hair to protest just how unfair it all is. And we do hear an awful lot about unfairness from this Administration.

It’s enough to make me suspect they have a clue in the White House, they have real numbers they aren’t showing us, that we really are this close to the fiscal cliff. Really, all it would take is for the bond markets to lose confidence, and — boom! — we’re Greece. Believe me, this is not the crew to inspire continued confidence in the bond markets.

Maybe on some level they want to lose, to get out of Washington before Barack Obama becomes the next Herbert Hoover.

That’s my theory. What’s yours?

27 Comments
You Can’t Touch This
May 22nd, 2012 – 12:01 pmOur Senate Democrats clearly have their finger on the pulse of the nation. Well, they have their finger on something:

The Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday moved forward with legislation to increase airline passenger security fees, beating back a GOP attempt to keep them at current levels.

The 2013 Homeland Security appropriations bill would increase one-way fees for passengers from $2.50 to $5 in order to close a budget shortfall at the Transportation Security Administration.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) said the $350 million in funding would otherwise come from taxpayers and argued it is better to stick passengers who rely on TSA with the bill.

The idea of stopping this security kabuki and abolishing the TSA ever entered their pointy little skulls.

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Making a Play for the Badger State
May 22nd, 2012 – 9:47 amNot news, from the WSJ — Wisconsin might be in play this year. The story is subscription only so I won’t pull a long quote, but Team Romney is eyeing to make Wisconsin a battleground if Governor Walker survives the recall election.

I suspect Walker is going to make it, and pretty handily. Call it a five-point spread. Maybe a bit better.

While Obama won WI pretty handily in 2008, you should remember that George W twice came close to painting the state red. He lost there by barely 4,000 votes in 2004, back when the GOP had very little state infrastructure. Today, the party controls the state government, and will continue to do so unless something unexpected happens during the June 5 recall.

In fact, let’s go back to my very first Wargaming the Electoral College map from last August.

I wrote then that

There’s a wave of disgust and despair in the industrial Great Lakes and Midwest. I believe this wave hurts both parties, making the region the battleground for 2012.

Wisconsin is doing better than the nation at large, which ought to help Obama. But Scott Walker has put together a pretty amazing machine, effectively governing a leftwing state from the center-right. Everything he and his team learn from the recall, they can put into play during the general election. And if a polarizing Republican like Bush can nearly win there, Wisconsin should certainly be winnable for a moderate like Romney.

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Making Sense of Nancy Pelosi’s Sense
May 21st, 2012 – 5:30 pm
Why should I send you elsewhere to get your Hair of the Dog, when you can do it right here.

Despite official estimates predicting millions of firms would claim ObamaCare’s small business tax credit for health insurance, actual usage has been a trickle, a new Government Accountability Report shows, because the credit was too complicated and too small.

Just 170,300 small businesses claimed it in 2010, Internal Revenue Service records show. The Obama Administration’s Council of Economic Advisers predicted 4 million businesses would claim it, while the Small Business Administration estimated 2.6 million.

The credit was too small to create an incentive for small businesses that didn’t previously provide employee insurance to begin offering it, the GAO report said. And the credit was too complicated for business owners to comply with.

Wait here while I go find my shocked face, that the Administration failed to understand how small business works.

4 Comments
Cutting Out the Middle Man
May 21st, 2012 – 1:44 pmThey say this is new, but it really isn’t:

China can now bypass Wall Street when buying U.S. government debt and go straight to the U.S. Treasury, in what is the Treasury’s first-ever direct relationship with a foreign government, according to documents viewed by Reuters.

There are lots of junkies with direct lines to their dealers.

5 Comments
Live, from Las Vegas…
May 21st, 2012 – 11:24 amKristle Helmuth was also at the Support Our Troops event, and has a great report on Army Corporal Christopher Levi, taking his very first swim — without his legs.

That’s with a tip of the hat to Black Five’s Bruce McQuain, who I learned is not only a real patriot, but a damn fine drinker.

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A Marine and His Dog
May 21st, 2012 – 5:30 amMarine Sgt. Kenneth Fischer never heard the blast. One second he was on patrol with his drug-sniffing dog, and the next he found himself down on his chest, with most of his right calf gone and a large, V-shaped piece of shrapnel under his vest and inside his right shoulder. Drak, his Belgian Malinois, was on the ground, too, just above Kenneth’s head.

Just in case you needed another reason not to like them, Fischer believes the Taliban may have purposely targeted his dog. On a DEA patrol during their first tour, Drak discovered a stash of Taliban heroin worth, by the DEA officer’s estimate, over a million dollars. Kenneth told me all of this over the course of a long brunch at The Palazzo in Las Vegas. We were both there for the Salute Our Troops event — he, as a wounded warrior, and me there as a witness.

Fischer will never know if there was an actual bounty on Drak, but the two of them “got blown up,” as he puts it, during a routine show-of-force patrol in Sangin last September. An ordinary looking Toyota Corolla, loaded with a couple hundred pounds of explosives, was driving towards them like any other car — until the Jihadi driver got close in and hit the detonator.

After taking his own physical inventory and making sure everything — well, most everything — was all where it was supposed to be, Kenneth checked on Drak. “I reached my hand up his leg, and when I got to his hip, I felt my hand slip inside,” he says. Drak whined the way a hurt dog does, to beg master to please stop. That’s about when the sergeant noticed the large pool of blood from his shoulder wound, and started calling for a corpsman.

Drak and Fischer were medivaced out on the same Blackhawk, but the dog was bleeding out. Drak was attended by a well-meaning Marine who had no rescue training for animals — he simply didn’t know what to do. In a bit of good luck, Kenneth’s best friend, Sgt. Mark Behl, was on the flight. Behl is also a dog handler, and told Kenneth that Drak would be OK, then took over Drak’s treatment. Fischer, his eardrums blown out and the chopper blades thumping, could hear nothing except “dog” and “OK.” But that was enough.

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Avengers, Assemble!
May 17th, 2012 – 6:44 pmTrifecta: Marvel’s The Avengers might just be the most explicitly pro-American, pro-liberty summer blockbuster ever. It also reached one billion dollars in ticket sales faster than any movie in history — mostly overseas.

Coincedence?

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The Tale of the Whale
May 17th, 2012 – 4:20 pmOverheard: “I saw an Asian billionaire come through with his entourage. Right behind him, a cowboy with his beer. Only in Vegas.”

Yeah, you don’t see all that many cowboys in Macou.

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You Wouldn’t Like Us When We’re Angry
May 17th, 2012 – 3:13 pmJim Geraghty has put his finger on what’s been bugging me about the President’s reelection efforts. Would you believe… inexperience? Of course you would:

The 2008 Democratic party was indeed a tough fight, but again Obama was assembling his familiar coalition – African-Americans, Hollywood, gays, the party’s liberal wing – to overcome Hillary’s white working-class base. And then in 2008, even with the wind of Bush fatigue at his back, Obama was trailing… until Lehman collapsed, McCain insisted the debates be canceled, and then he changed his mind two days ago. In other words, 2008 was a perfect storm for Obama’s appeal to independents, centrists, Democrats who were unconvinced in the primary and frustrated Republicans. Obama has never really had to try to win over, say, the suburbs or exurbs of Columbus, Orlando, Colorado Springs, or other “in play” parts of the political map in less than ideal circumstances.

I can tell you, the dispirited voters of Colorado Springs did nothing for McCain in 2008. By the fall of 2010, they were fully re-spirited, hustling and campaigning like Reagan Himself was on the ticket — in an off-year election with very little competition to worry about from our local Democrats.

Part of Axelrod’s plan — and he’s executing it as well as anyone could — is to redispirit (Shhh — that is so a word) those same voters.

But he might instead be kicking the hornet’s nest.

I think next week it will be time to launch this season’s Wargaming the Electoral College series.

Stand by.

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The View from The Palazzo
May 17th, 2012 – 12:32 pmBloggers, writing at home in our pajamas, don’t often get to make small talk with billionaires. Yet that’s precisely what happened yesterday at lunch, when Sheldon Adelson dropped by our unofficial media table to if we were enjoying our stay. I was there with Black Five’s Bruce McQuain and Kristle Helmouth and Commentary’s Alana Goodman — and it should come as no surprise that one of the richest men in the world is something of a stickler for details.

Lunch was held at a VIP suite set up by The Palazzo as part of the Support Our Troops events here through Saturday morning. It’s a benefit for wounded troops, put on by the Armed Forces Foundation, along with Southwest Airlines, Omaha Steaks, and of course, Mr. Adelson and his wife, Miriam.

The food is excellent. The free drinks are always — always — appreciated. And the suites are, as advertised, five star. There’s a pool reserved just for the troops, a couple of very exclusive dinners, free shows, the works. But it’s more than just a nice few days in Vegas.

But the best part was a detail I missed during the big arrival yesterday morning. I was all caught up in the moment, which was easy to do. It looked like every single employee from the resort had turned out to form an honor guard from the front door, through the massive lobby, then all the way to the Big Giant Fancy Reception Room (not it’s actual name) for the opening ceremony. The only reason I’m sure it wasn’t every employee, is that the place continued to function. But otherwise, you could’ve fooled me.

The detail I’d missed, Bruce pointed out to me last night. He had followed one particular group of soldiers in, and stayed with them through the whole, long walk. Bruce said that, at first, the guys (and gals) were simply overwhelmed by the reception. And then, after a moment, he watched the stress — months, years, of stress — melt off their faces.

And he’s right. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a happy group of people.

Talking to the AFF’s Patricia Driscoll yesterday, there was one question that was really bugging me. With so many deserving soldiers, airmen, Marines, sailors… with so many to choose from, how do you pick? Of course, recommendations from their officers come in handy, but there was one important detail I’d never have thought about: Meds. “It’s not fair,” she said, “to bring guys to Las Vegas and then tell them they can’t drink.” So the AFF talks to the doctors to make sure they aren’t on any drugs that would prevent them from enjoying all the Palazzo’s amenities.

A Democratic Senate candidate in North Dakota is distancing herself from President Barack Obama, saying that he has “failed the one test America had for him.”

Heidi Heitkamp, a former North Dakota attorney general seeking to replace the retiring Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), told the AP that Obama has “failed in the one test America had for him, which was to unite the country.”

“I think he needed to be more hands-on… I don’t think he’s done enough to think broadly and come up with solutions that would engage both sides in a reasonable dialogue,” she added.

Campaigning in the solid red state which went for John McCain over Obama in 2008, Heitkamp also distanced herself from the president on energy policy, especially his wavering over the issue of the Keystone XL pipeline.

“So we’re going to wait until we have a better economy and have more costs?” she said, according to the wire service. “You look at it now, and it makes perfect sense.”

Heitkamp is facing off in the Senate race off against Rep. Rick Berg (R-N.D.), who was elected to Congress in 2010 with tea party backing.

The criticism comes amidst other signs of discontent among Democrats regarding the president, for example the case of rising Democratic star and New Jersey mayor Cory Booker criticizing the Obama campaign for its treatment of private equity.

And in Tuesday’s Democratic primary in Kentucky, “uncommitted” received over 40 percent of the vote to Obama’s nearly 58 percent. “Uncommitted” won 67 of the state’s 120 counties.

When it was his turn to ask his rival a question, Kelly asked Barber to declare who he’ll vote for in November for president, and Barber — although a Democrat with an incumbent president of his party — refused, saying he’s focused on his own campaign.

Kelly used that demurral as an opportunity to say Barber won’t even admit that he supports Obama and “Obamacare,” a law that Kelly described as terrible.

“My biggest fear is Mr. Obama’s job-killing policies,” Kelly said.

Barber later retorted that his biggest fear is Kelly’s “extreme policies.”

Without Lexington and Louisville, Obama would have lost Kentucky to ‘uncommitted’

President Barack Obama’s poor showing in Tuesday’s Democratic primary in Kentucky could mean trouble for state Democrats on the ballot this fall.

Obama was the sole candidate in the race, mustering 57.9 percent of the vote. The remaining 42.1 percent of Democratic voters chose “uncommitted.”

If Fayette and Jefferson counties were removed from the vote count in the sparsely attended election, “uncommitted” would have bested the president. “Uncommitted” received the majority of votes in 67 counties, compared to Obama’s 52 counties. In Calloway County, it was a tie.

On Wednesday, state Democrats quickly dismissed the idea that an unpopular president might torpedo their chances in November, noting that the same Kentucky electorate overwhelmingly elected a Democratic governor last year.

But Kentucky Republican Party chairman Steve Robertson said Obama’s weak showing is bad news for state House Democrats and Democratic U.S. Rep. Ben Chandler, who faces a rematch this fall with Republican Andy Barr in the 6th Congressional District. Chandler beat Barr in 2010 by 647 votes.

In 12 of 19 counties that make up the 6th Congression al District, which got new boundaries earlier this year that make it slightly more Democratic-leaning, “uncommitted” performed better than Obama.

“If I was Ben Chandler, I would not be celebrating the changes in redistricting,” Robertson said. “I think there is tremendous opportunity for Andy Barr, who has consolidated the Republican vote.”

The National Republican Congressional Committee also pounced on the number of people in Chandler’s district who did not vote for Obama, saying Chandler was out of step with the majority of people in his district.

“Yesterday, Democrats in Chandler’s district put him on notice that they’ve had enough of his agenda and enough of politicians who put Washington ahead of Kentucky’s interests,” said Nat Sillin, a spokesman for the committee.

Please show me where the Republicans have a) required anyone to have a monthly ultrasound for no reason b) proposed denying anyone contraceptives (not wanting to pay for is not the same as denying), or c) required anyone’s doctor to lie.

And BTW, as a nurse I can tell you that 99.9% of the time, ALL women who are going in to get an abortion get an ultrasound as part of the workup for the procedure. The ultrasound itself is not some “new” requirement. I had a damn abortion before. I had the usual routine ultrasound prior, because it’s safe medical practice to see the size and location, etc of the fetus before you start poking around in there. The only thing that the TX law and others wanted was to require showing the woman the ultrasound as part of informed consent. Whether one agrees with that position or not, it is hardly the RAPE WAND! RAPE WAND! ZOMG!!!! travesty that the idiot hair-on-fire folks on the left portrayed it. The ultrasound was being done anyway in almost all cases. Want to argue that the woman should not be shown the ultrasound? Fine, then argue that. But arguing that the act of doing the ultrasound itself is some terrible assault is flaming bullshit with an overreactive cherry on top.

Also, pardon me if I don’t view an ultrasound as the ultimate intimate violation, when you are there for the express purpose of spreading your legs, hoisting them up in the stirrups and having a godamned medical Hoovering device inserted into your uterus. Of those two, the ultrasound is hardly the most invasive or intimate. So spare me the “OMG, it’s so terrible to have them dooo thaaaat to meeee!!” bullshit.

Lehman collapsed, McCain insisted the debates be canceled, and then he changed his mind two days

====================

Why is this Rightwing commenter boosting the Obama meme that McCain did something wrong? When Lehman collapsed, Congress got together to pass an emergency huge bailout and this was supposedly a big crisis. McCain suspended his campaign to get back to his job in Congress. Debate people were upset, so McCain managed to get to the debate after all, losing his own time to prepare.

There is a difference between ‘jelly on belly’ ultrasounds (which are legitimately used b abortion providers in a reasonable schedule) and vaginal wand ultrasounds — which is what I specified.

There’s also such a thing as satire. 😉 The Republicans who are pushing these war on women laws (mostly in state legislatures) aren’t sticking it to their own staffs only, who are presumably adults who consented to work for the GOP — they are sticking it to all women who live in their jurisdiction.

We hear about these GOP bills one at a time; I’m watching for some source to make a consolidated list I can post here for your approval.

It is easy to day trade politics in which case the long term trends get missed. Loathsome Tom Friedman demonstrated the old axiom that even a broken clock is right twice a day when he said that the sheer forces within both parties are severe based on globalization, and the internal alliances are breaking down, which suggests either the emergence of a third party or a plethora of new parties based on the french model. Stephen Green’s comments above merely underscore these points. The dims make political hay out of the growing gap between the haves and have nots while failing to acknowledge that they are the main culprit in this unfolding tragedy. The megalomaniacs of the left are keen on disenfranchising the American People and arrogating all power to themselves. It is so obvious. But parallel developments are occurring now on the business front, as we see the public corporation being replaced by new forms which favor the concentration of large amounts of money and secrecy. The Quantum Fund of Soros is a prototypical example. These entities have a competitive advantage over the public corporation which is hamstrung by excessive regulation and the quarterly mindset which is anathema to long term thinking. They are the emerging vehicle to exploit global opportunity, and because they are not publicly traded the middle class is unable to buy in and participate in that kind of growth. The following article by one of the few seers in the business press underscores the societal significance of this developments. The few examples I have seen of this where venture capitalists buy a company and run it from behind the curtain do not warrant any sort of optimism about this trend. None.

This article found a lot of numbers about Democratic Senators staff equity– but didn’t look for the numbers for GOP Senators!

It does have a useful mention of a bill coming up that would put back the teeth into the Ledbetter act that Obama took out. It quotes Obama lying about Ledbetter too (though I haven’t verified those quotes, or anything in the article).

=====================http://freebeacon.com/senate-dems-betray-lilly/
Senate Democrats plan to bring the Paycheck Fairness Act, which some have described as a “trial lawyers’ payday” that would facilitate large punitive damage claims in discrimination suits, up for a vote following the Memorial Day recess.

Congress already passed equal pay legislation in January 2009. President Obama has frequently touted that bill—the Lilly Ledbetter Act—as the first piece of legislation he signed upon taking office, and has sought to declare “problem solved” on the issue of equal pay for women.

“We passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act—the first bill I signed—so that equal pay for equal work is a reality all across this country,” he said in June 2009.

When it comes to prosecuting instances of gender pay discrimination, however, the Obama administration has been far less active than that of his Republican predecessor George W. Bush. Under Obama, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed six gender-based wage discrimination lawsuits. That number is down from 18 lawsuits filed during Bush’s s

The state capitalism variant which we see today in China, as the vehicle for exploiting global opportunity is the form which Obama acolyte Zeib Breznesky favors, and the secretive partnership form is favored by Soros and his ilk. They provide for the vast accumulation of personal wealth without social responsibility, and it is no answer that these people contribute to charitable enterprises, when the bulk of what they do undermines the public good.

As you may recall, Hillary wanted to tax and regulate these hedge funds, and that is another reason why the democrat party which is controlled by bad people, blocked her assent to the presidency. The other reason, of course, was her statement in Ohio that she would re-examine NAFTA to make sure it was working for the American People, while Obama dispatched that traitor Goolsbee to assure Canada that he would not (after he told the voters in Ohio that he would).

turndown, you are full of crap. The transvaginal ultrasound is the normal standard of care for pre-op clearance for a D &C. And again, it is LESS invasive and/or uncomfortable than the very procedure they are there to receive.

It’s ridiculous on the face of it. Ultrasound probe is RAAAAAPE!, but a huge-ass speculum, Goudell dilator, vaginal retractor, polyp forceps, and big suction curettes used for the procedure itself are not? Give me a freaking break.

I WORKED the gyn floor of the hospital, turndown. I know what is used for a D&C. I’ve assisted. And going all faint-ish over a little ultrasound probe while you are preparing to undergo all the rest is just silly.

Again, want to argue that requiring staff to show the woman the ultrasound is not fair? THEN ARGUE THAT. There is actually a legitimate argument on both sides of that one. But characterizing ultrasounds as some weird assault in light of all the OTHER things that are about to be put into the hoohah in question is just damn silly.

The 2004 version of Barack Obama, who captured the nation with a dazzling speech about unity and went on to win the presidency on a message of hope, died on Monday. He was 8 years old.

The cause of death appeared to be a bitter realization that he needed to win reelection in an increasingly partisan political environment, a cancer that he had been battling for months if not years.

Obama’s illness got the best of him late Monday, as he announced that his campaign for four more years in the White House would be based not on optimism, but rather the shady corporate record of his opponent, Mitt Romney, who ran a private-equity firm that few Americans knew about before this year.

Obama’s announcement was a stark contrast to the speech that catapulted him into his party’s sights eight years ago, when he electrified Democrats at their quadrennial convention.

And how long prior? How far a trip to the clinic and how long a waiting period between those trips?

Irrelevant. The taxpayer via the govt is under no obligation to make abortions easy to get. I am pro-choice. Which means I do not wish to see abortion made illegal. How you pay for it or where you go to get it is NOT MY PROBLEM.

I really love this attitude of “Unless you are paying for it and making it easily available to me, you are BANNING it and infringing on my right to do it!” Bullshit. I love Starbucks lattes. My closest Starbucks is far from walking distance, plus, you are not paying for my lattes.

WHY IS THE GOVT TRYING TO BAN MY LATTES???!!!!! DO I NOT HAVE A RIGHT TO DRINK A LATTE IF I WANT TO???? THESE F*CKERS ARE RESTRICTING MY ACCESS TO LATTES! THEY ARE MAKING IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO GET A LATTE! WHO IS GOING TO PAY FOR MY LATTE??! IF YOU WON’T PAY FOR MY LATTE, YOU ARE INTERFERING WITH MY RIGHT TO HAVE ONE AT ALL!

The truth is that lattes are perfectly legal, and I can go get one if I choose to do so, I can find someone to sell me one, and can pay for one. Which is precisely my position on “access” to abortion. Keep it legal. Other than that, I could care less.

Sick and tired of the United States looking like a “third world country” and outsiders coming here to “suck the blood out of this country,” quirky developer and TV personality Donald Trump is eyeing a new super PAC to help defeat President Obama.

Presumably, the super PAC would also act to help Mitt Romney, who Trump has endorsed. Money shouldn’t be an issue for the wealthy casino, golf course, resort and real estate developer. And neither should public relations, since Trump is a one-man publicity hound who even toyed with a presidential bid last year. [snip]

–“If I did one [super PAC] I would show how bad we’re doing as a country, how disrespected we are as a country. I would show people from OPEC, 11 people sitting around a beautiful gold-encrusted table talking about how they are going to continue to rip off the United States.”

–“My super PAC ads would be focused on how outside places and outside things are absolutely sucking the blood out of this country, and this country can’t be great again unless it really starts to generate money.”

–“You come back to this country and you land at La Guardia or Kennedy or in Los Angeles and we’re like a Third World country.”

Admin: I like the commercial suggested by Dennis Miller featuring Romney in a room with the debt clock telling the real story of the Obama economy– a variant of the old mickey mouse watch but featuring Barack Hussein rather than mickey, and Romney says I approve of this ad but not what Obama has done to the economy while pointing at the clock, fade to black/

Treachery — the movie 24 May 2012
We can now all see, can’t we, with what fathomless contempt the Obama administration treats the security of America and the west. Documents released under US freedom of information laws suggest that defence department and CIA officials have jeopardised national security by giving Hollywood filmmakers access to top-secret information about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The Telegraph reports:
‘Congressman Peter King of New York, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said on Wednesday that the emails told a “damning story of extremely close, unprecedented, and potentially dangerous collaboration” between top Obama officials, the filmmakers and a Left-wing lobbying firm.
‘”If this facility is so secret that the name cannot even be seen by the public, then why in the world would the Obama Administration allow filmmakers to tour it?” Mr King asked.’
Why in the world indeed; and why in the world did the Obama administration also leak, with potentially even more catastrophic effect, operational secrets of the recent intelligence coup which foiled an al Qaeda airline bomb attack on the US?
On that occasion, sources within the administration actually blew the cover of the British-run Saudi double agent who foiled the plot, thus compromising not only that man’s personal safety but also similar future intelligence stings and a priceless source of anti-terrorist intelligence out of Yemen.
Once could just about be put down to sloppiness. Twice, however, suggests some kind of malevolent myopia or active malice – and fingers point to the Obama campaign. The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, has ordered an inquiry into the Yemen leak, but this does not cover the White House (or National Security Council officials).
As for the bin Laden movie, now scheduled to open in December, its original October release date has fuelled suspicions that it was intended to boost Obama’s re-election chances in November – a suspicion enhanced by the revelation that some of the contact between officials and the film’s producers was brokered by the Left-leaning lobbying firm the Glover Park Group, whose senior employees include former Clinton administration staffers.
In both cases, it would seem that the only thing these unknown official leakers could see both in the operation to kill bin Laden and the thwarting of the Yemen bomb plot was a PR opportunity for Obama. As far as the continued security of the US and the west is concerned, either these individuals actively wish to frustrate its defence or they just couldn’t care less whether or not it succeeds.
Thus the treacherous administration of the man who is seeking re-election as the leader of the free world.http://melaniephillips.com/treachery-the-movie

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist and author. She is best known for her controversial column about political and social issues which currently appears in the Daily Mail.

One way to look at it I guess.
—————————–
I think this frame of reference makes it easy to choose between the two. Obviously, Romney is Catwoman. Catwoman sometimes helps Batman and sometimes goes against him, and Romney has a record of being on both sides of a lot of issues. So as president, he may help us and stay out of the way as we create jobs, but eventually he’ll probably turn on us and enact some awful regulations that get in our way. We’ll think he’s on our side, and suddenly the royal crown we are protecting will be nowhere to be found and neither will Romney. I can’t believe we trusted you, Cat-Mitt!

Obama, on the other hand, is obviously the Joker. He’s a job killing maniac who can’t be reasoned with. There’s just no method to his madness. One moment he’s creating some giant new government program that no one wanted in Obamacare, and the next he’s spending a trillion dollars in “stimulus” money that has so little effect you’d swear he just put the money in a warehouse and burned it. If we’re going to elect a job killer, we should at least get one who can destroy jobs without having to spend trillions doing it. But Obama doesn’t care about anything logical or rational like the deficit or America’s long-term well-being. He just wants to watch the economy burn.

Obama is not nearly as arbitrary and unpredictable as the above vignette suggests. It gets down to correlations. Towit: there is a direct correlation between what Obama does, and the interests of his contributors. There is an inverse correlation between what he says and what he does. Finally, and most important of all, there is an inverse correlation between what Obama does, and the general welfare of this nation. And anyone who denies this is either a liar or a fool.

“There is a difference between ‘jelly on belly’ ultrasounds (which are legitimately used b abortion providers in a reasonable schedule) and vaginal wand ultrasounds — which is what I specified.”
********
Posting uninformed opinion as “fact” is not helpful for maintaining reproductive choice for women. H4T is essentially right about ultrasound. A survey of abortion providers done about 10 years ago reported that >90% did routine pre-abortion ultrasounds. I suspect that a repeat survey now would be close to 100%. A surgical abortion can be done safely with proper history, physical exam and lab work for a first trimester pregnancy. IMO, with the issues of medical liability in the US today, an abortion provider would be crazy not to do an ultrasound. I don’t know the percentages of vaginal vs trans-abdominal ultrasound, but I suspect for “technical” reasons, the vast majority are done trans-vaginally.

What would happen if Congress had to apply the regulations in Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, and other corporate accounting law to its own balance sheets? Instead of talking about trillion-dollar deficits, USA Today reports from its analysis, we’d be talking about five times that amount:

The typical American household would have paid nearly all of its income in taxes last year to balance the budget if the government used standard accounting rules to compute the deficit, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

Under those accounting practices, the government ran red ink last year equal to $42,054 per household — nearly four times the official number reported under unique rules set by Congress.

A U.S. household’s median income is $49,445, the Census reports.

The big difference between the official deficit and standard accounting: Congress exempts itself from including the cost of promised retirement benefits. Yet companies, states and local governments must include retirement commitments in financial statements, as required by federal law and private boards that set accounting rules.

The deficit was $5 trillion last year under those rules. The official number was $1.3 trillion. Liabilities for Social Security, Medicare and other retirement programs rose by $3.7 trillion in 2011, according to government actuaries, but the amount was not registered on the government’s books.

Why doesn’t Congress follow the same accounting rules for its unfunded future liabilities that it requires of businesses and lower levels of government? The long answer is that these liabilities are arguably not incurred until the federal government pays them. Congress can change the statutes governing Medicare and Social Security at any time to reduce or eliminate these future liabilities. Therefore, the official budget numbers only account for the liabilities that come due in the same budget cycle. In fact, USA Today gets that exact explanation from an analyst at the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which tells us where a great deal of the problem originates.

The short answer? Because they want to get re-elected, that’s why. And the same politicians who screech about corporate malpractice and fraud are the same politicians who insist that there really isn’t an entitlement crisis, and that we’ll be totally OK until 2034, or 2068, or the year 2525, if man is still alive and woman can survive, etc etc etc. They like to pass laws that apply to everyone else but themselves.

In an interview with Newsmax TV, Trump voiced anger at OPEC for seeking more than they deserve for oil, and Obama for letting infrastructure fade. But he also expressed high hopes that the nation could turn around, based on tapping home-grown energy sources.

Excerpts from the interview include:

–“If I did one [super PAC] I would show how bad we’re doing as a country, how disrespected we are as a country. I would show people from OPEC, 11 people sitting around a beautiful gold-encrusted table talking about how they are going to continue to rip off the United States.”

–“My super PAC ads would be focused on how outside places and outside things are absolutely sucking the blood out of this country, and this country can’t be great again unless it really starts to generate money.”

–“You come back to this country and you land at La Guardia or Kennedy or in Los Angeles and we’re like a Third World country.”

SHV
May 24th, 2012 at 1:12 pm
TDO:
“There is a difference between ‘jelly on belly’ ultrasounds (which are legitimately used b abortion providers in a reasonable schedule) and vaginal wand ultrasounds — which is what I specified.”

======================

As I said, any legitamte medical need for ultrasound is ALREADY being taken care of by the abortion providers. One of the GOP attacks on women is to require an ADDITIONAL ultrasound at a different facility plus a waiting period which means extra travel for the patient.

The State Department has launched a different sort of raid against al-Qaeda — hacking into al-Qaeda websites in Yemen.

Hillary’s hackers…

In a rare public admission of the covert cyber war against extremists, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says cyber experts based at the State Department hacked Yemeni tribal websites, replacing al-Qaeda propaganda that bragged about killing Americans.

“Within 48 hours, our team plastered the same sites with altered versions of the ads that showed the toll al-Qaeda attacks have taken on the Yemeni people,” Clinton said Wednesday.

In response, “Extremists are publicly venting their frustration and asking supporters not to believe everything they read on the Internet,” she said.

Pls distinguish ‘government paying for’ something from government adding obstacles to getting it by paying for it yourself.

Also, the fact that current abortion techniques are primitive and invasive (and the government restricts access to contraceptives or chemical abortion) — does not excuse the GOP requiring an ADDITIONAL invasive procedure (in addition to the ultrasounds that the abortion provider already does).

(Forgive me, but sometimes I’m reminded of the sort of response that means a boilerplate has been triggered, rather than that someone actuallly read my message.)

I will say this about the ultra sound in TX prior to an abortion. Obviously it is an attempt by the right to life to have a woman visualize exactly what she is doing A Fetus looks very human early on and it wants that woman to know clearly what she is doing.

The oft held beielf that we are in a deomocracy and the idea of the reason for separation of church and state does not compute. The separation of church and state was desired to keep the government from setting up a state church as in Great Britain; not to eliminate religion.

the Democratic Party committed suicide when it dumped the FDR Coalition led by Hillary Clinton in favor of the Barack Obama Situation Comedy coalition.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
never forget..never forgive
👿

Since this is being discussed today, and these poll results came out very recently, Iam posting the following. Pro-abortion (no euphemisms for me) support is on a downward trend.
—————–
WASHINGTON, D.C. May 23, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – A new Gallup poll shows a record-low number of Americans describe themselves as “pro-choice,” while half call themselves “pro-life.”

The poll, conducted from May 3-6, found only 41 percent of Americans would embrace the “pro-choice” monicker, the lowest level since the company began asking the question in 1995.

Exactly 50 percent said they identified as pro-life, a near-record high.

The results closely track results in May 2009, when 51 percent of Americans called themselves “pro-life” and 42 percent called themselves “pro-choice.”

Since that poll, more Americans have labeled themselves pro-life than pro-choice, a situation Gallup calls “the new normal.”

A majority of Americans believe abortion is immoral, the most recent survey found. Those who believe abortion is wrong exceed those who do not by a wide margin, 13 percentage points (51 percent to 38 percent).

The poll contains some interesting revelations leading into the 2012 presidential election.

For only the second time, more independents identify as “pro-life” (47 percent) than “pro-choice” (41 percent). The Hill newspaper reports Mitt Romney has led Barack Obama among independent voters in 12 of the 14 polls taken over the last two months by an average of 6.5 percent. “That suggests that Romney doesn’t need to pivot dramatically to the center, shed partisan identity or turn his back on the GOP base to gain favor with nonpartisans,” the paper states.

Breakdown among the parties was more predictable, with both parties trending more pro-life.

Pollsters found 72 percent of Republicans were pro-life, one of the highest margins ever, while only 22 percent are “pro-choice,” a record low.

However, the number of Democrats who describe themselves as “pro-choice” has hit its lowest level since 2003 (58 percent). Meanwhile, more than one-third of Democrats, 34 percent, say they are “pro-life.”

If you’re gonna play, then use contraceptives which are readily available. And if a guy won’t wrap it, then keep them there legs closed. Now that shows a woman’s control over her body before the damage is done.

Unfortunately my daughter works in a middle school and they average 4=6 pg’s per year. one actually, yes, was her second…middle school.

There is no one home to instill morals/customs to our children. The children are having children and raising them on our dime. No I am sorry, we are raising them in many instances. If the dime stops, I bet we see a major decrease in unwed children.

This
This all we need, more liberal BS…control the news and you control the message and you control the people…
***************

Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A) struck a deal this month to acquire 63 newspapers, said he may buy more publications as the industry rethinks whether to offer free content on the Interne

gonzotx
May 24th, 2012 at 5:56 pm
—————
True. I have witnessed teen pregnancy with my niece who got pregnant in her junior year. She is raising her son (a very cute kid) while living in my sister’s home. My sister and b-i-l are providing the financial/material support. My niece is 19, and per a
conversation with my sister today, my niece will be looking for work this summer. They all juggle their schedules around the boy. It is a family effort, not a
government one. Kudos to them all as far as I am concerned. “T” is a good little boy, and although his birth introduced more difficulties within the household, he has been a blessing to the family.

Shadowfax, I’m just expressing my opinion which happens to be opposite of some here. My intent is only to show that not all Democrats/former Democrats support abortion. My biggest response to it is one of sadness more than anything else. It’s spiritual with me. I think of this spirit connected to the physical body not being given the opportunity to flourish as both you and I have been. I know that I am not changing people’s minds with my comments, or at least not trying to
do so in this particular forum.

You have as much right to your opinion as anyone here and I would hope that you realize there are more situations as to why some women would go though with an abortion than just carelessly not using contraception.

Texiera and his crew of pointy headed intellectuals have it all figured out–a permanent Obama electoral majority, favorable demographic trends, echoed and re-echoed by Alan 13 keys–all based on a 2008 static model and no seismic changes such as we saw in 2010. This explains their hysteria over the tea party–THEY NEVER SAW IT COMING. Newton’s Third Law of Physics: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The coffee party began by the little chi-com never quite measured up to the tea party movement, because it was never organic–just a fake–in Obama’s Age of Fake, and his 2012 Campaign of Fake. Therefore, the question is will the American People be able to distinguish between what is real and what is fake? Time will tell.

Life in the Cocoon–By Michael Barone

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), speaks at her weekly news conference on Capitol hill, May 10, 2012 in Washington, DC. Examiner columnist Michael Barone contends that liberals such as the former Speaker of the House live in a political cocoon that allows them to avoid having to come into contact with conservative ideas such as those espoused by talk show host Rush Limbaugh or others, which leaves them unprepared to respond to questions about their ideas. (Getty Images)

It’s comfortable living in a cocoon — associating only with those who share your views, reading journalism and watching news that only reinforce them, avoiding those on the other side of the cultural divide.

Liberals have been doing this for a long time. In 1972 the movie critic Pauline Kael said it was odd that Richard Nixon was winning the election, because everyone she knew was for George McGovern.

Kael wasn’t clueless about the rest of America. She was just observing that her own social circle was politically parochial.

The rest of us have increasingly sought out comfortable cocoons too. Journalist Bill Bishop, who lives in an Austin, Texas, neighborhood whose politics resemble Kael’s, started looking at national data.

It inspired him to write his 2008 book, “The Big Sort,” which describes how Americans since the 1970s have increasingly sorted themselves out, moving to places where almost everybody shares their cultural orientation and political preference — and the others keep quiet about theirs.

Thus professionals with a choice of where to make their livings head for the San Francisco Bay Area if they’re liberal and for the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (they really do call it that) if they’re conservative. Over the years, the Bay Area becomes more liberal and the Metroplex more conservative.

But cocooning has an asymmetrical effect on liberals and conservatives. Even in a cocoon, conservatives cannot avoid liberal mainstream media, liberal Hollywood entertainment and, these days, the liberal Obama administration.

They’re made uncomfortably aware of the arguments of those on the other side. Which gives them an advantage in fashioning their own responses.

Liberals can protect themselves better against assaults from outside their cocoon. They can stay out of megachurches and make sure their remote controls never click on Fox News. They can stay off the AM radio dial so they will never hear Rush Limbaugh.

The problem is that this leaves them unprepared to make the best case for their side in public debate. They are too often not aware of holes in arguments that sound plausible when bandied between confreres entirely disposed to agree.

We have seen how this works on some issues this year.

Take the arguments developed by professor Randy Barnett of Georgetown Law that Obamacare’s mandate to buy health insurance is unconstitutional. Some liberal scholars like Jack Balkin of Yale have addressed them with counterarguments of their own.

But liberal politicians and Eric Holder’s Justice Department remained clueless about them. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked whether Obamacare was unconstitutional, could only gasp, “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

In March, after the Supreme Court heard extended oral argument on the case, CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin was clearly flabbergasted that a majority of justices seemed to take the case against Obamacare’s constitutionality very seriously indeed.

Liberals better informed about the other side’s case might have drafted the legislation in a way to avoid this controversy. But nothing they heard in their cocoon alerted them to the danger.

Another case in point is Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s law restricting the bargaining powers of public employee unions. The unions and the crowds in Madison, which is both the state capital and a university town and which with surrounding Dane County voted 73 to 26 percent for Barack Obama, egged each other on with cries that this would destroy the working class. No one they knew found this implausible.

The unions had an economic motive to oppose the laws and seek to recall first Republican legislators and then Walker himself. The law ended the automatic checkoff of union dues, which operated as an involuntary transfer of money from taxpayers to union leaders.

But voters declined to recall enough Republicans to give Democrats a majority in the Senate, and Walker currently leads Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in polls on the June 5 recall election.

The Madison mob seemed unaware that there were attractive arguments on Walker’s side.

Why should public employee union members pay less for health insurance and get fatter pensions than the taxpayers who pay their salaries? Why is it a bad thing for property taxes to be held down and for school districts to cut perks for union members enough to hire more teachers?

Beyond the Madison cocoon, in Wisconsin’s other 71 counties, which voted 55 to 44 percent for Walker in 2010, such arguments are evidently proving persuasive. Maybe liberals should listen to Rush every so often.

Michael Barone,The Examiner’s senior political analyst, can be contacted at mbarone@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Wednesday and Sunday, and his stories and blog posts appear on washingtonexaminer.com.

BTW, nomobama, I admire your family for helping out your niece and her child, very few women have that kind of family support and I have walked in the shoes of abused and battered women that run for safety alone or raise their child as a single parent.

When Barack Obama two years ago joked at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that potential suitors of his two daughters might have to deal with Predator drones (“But boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for you: Predator drones. You will never see it coming.”), the liberal crowd roared. That failed macabre joke would have earned George W. Bush a week of headline condemnation from the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Obama, in fact, has increased those judge/jury/executioner targeted assassinations tenfold during his tenure. But apparently, the combination of Obama’s postracial “cool” and the video-game nature of such airborne death — no CNN clips of charred torsos and smoldering legs, no prisoners with their ACLU lawyers in Guantanamo, no Seymour Hersh exposé on a Waziristan granny who was vaporized for being too near her terrorist-suspect grandson, no American losses for Code Pink and Moveon.org to demonstrate against — earned general exemption for that new liberal way of war. What bothered us about the Predator strikes in 2006–2008 was not the kills per se but the uncool nature of twangy Texan George Bush, who ordered them.

Last week 28-year-old, $17 billion–rich, jeans-clad Mark Zuckerberg took Wall Street for a multibillion-dollar ride, making his original buddies instant billionaires and his loyal larger circle millionaires. Note that there is no Occupy Wall Street protest at Facebook headquarters. Just as there are none at Oprah’s house or the residence of Leonardo DiCaprio, despite their take each year of between $50 and $100 million.
No one has suggested that Hollywood lower movie-ticket prices by asking Johnny Depp or Jennifer Lopez to walk away with $10 or $20 million less a year. Steve Jobs found ways to dodge taxes comparable to those deployed by any Wall Street fatcat, but he was iPad cool, and so his iPhone billions were exempt from the Occupy nonsense. Cool capitalists are immune from the neo-Marxist critique of capitalism — a racket that $40 billion–rich Warren Buffett learned late in life, but well enough, with the “Buffett Rule.”

We simply don’t mind that Google and Amazon rake in billions, but we despise Exxon and Archer Daniels Midland for doing the same. It is not that we need social networking and Internet searches more than food and fuel, but rather that we have the impression that cool zillionaires in flipflops are good while uncool ones in wingtips are quite bad.
I am sure that the tax lawyers who help Richard Branson and Mick Jagger are no less skilled at shorting the Treasury than those who work for Rush Limbaugh, but the profits of the former are okay while the latter’s are obscene. Limbaugh is a misogynist for using the word “slut” and apologizing for it; Bill Maher is a feminist for using slurs we cannot print and for which he did not apologize. One is uncool, the other very cool — as was a cynical and sarcastic David Letterman, who implied that the 14-year-old daughter of Sarah Palin had snuck into the Yankees’ dugout for quick sex with Alex Rodriquez.
The power of cool is evident also in politics. State quite correctly that you can see Russia from parts of Alaska, and you are ditzy white-trash Sarah from Wasilla; state falsely that Franklin Roosevelt addressed the nation on television in 1929, and you are just “good ol’ Joe Biden.”

John Kerry’s second married-into fortune probably dwarfs the one that Mitt Romney made himself, perhaps by a factor of ten. While we heard in 2012 that Romney wanted a car elevator in one of his many houses, we never heard much in 2004 of presidential candidate Kerry’s various mansions, boats, or assorted playthings, or how he proved to be a keen investor as a senator helping to set U.S. financial policy.

Kerry, you see, was cool. He windsurfed and wore spandex as he cycled, and found his exemption by championing the poor he rarely saw. The same was true of John Edwards of “Two Americas” fame. Do we now recall how he ran to the left of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, despite the $500 haircuts and the self-indulgent mansion, replete with “John’s room,” a hideaway with all sorts of adolescent toys? Edwards, remember, earned those spoils by charming juries in his smarmy style, and nearly destroyed the practice of obstetrics in North Carolina through his flurry of malpractice suits. No matter, Edwards was liberal, Kennedyesque, and cool — and he earned prophylaxis in the manner of JFK himself, of whose White House orgies we did not learn until a half-century later. Likewise we have been taught that there is no “power imbalance” or “insidious asymmetry” when a “mentor” has sexual relations with his young intern — as long as he is a feminist like Bill Clinton.

What, then, exactly, is this cool that allows you to earn whatever you like without censure, and then to spend it as you please without fear of public scorn?

It would seem that the disconnect is liberal politics, the coin by which one buys a sort of medieval indulgence from liberal gatekeepers in the media, academia, the arts, and the foundations that permits one to continue the pursuit and enjoyment of lucre and to indulge the baser appetites without harassment — in the manner that the medieval moneylender or sexual zealot still got to heaven by buying marble for the cash-strapped cathedral. That $20 billion–rich George Soros was a money speculator who almost destroyed the small depositors of the Bank of England and was convicted in France of insider trading matters not at all: Without his roulette-wheel billions we would not have Media Matters. Jon Corzine of MF Global cannot explain what he did with $1.2 billion of other people’s money.

But there will never be a “Corzine Law.”

Who cares what George Clooney makes an hour, or how exactly his close friends can afford to pony up for a $40,000-a-plate dinner — when the takings will help Barack Obama feed the children? If Halliburton were wise, it would buy the shut-down Solyndra plant, make solar panels at a loss, and write the cost off as a lobbying and public-relations expense.
So cool is not obtained just through liberal politics. Images and intent are critical too. The stuffy tea-party crowd looks like the plain suburban guys and gals who sell us houses, cars, and insurance. And so, of course, they must be racist, even though their demonstrations give no proof of any such fetish. Their only oddity would seem to be a certain desire to ensure that they leave no litter in their wake for poorer custodians to clean up.

But Occupy Wall Street? That movement has produced thugs, thieves, rapists, would-be bombers, rioters, and street urchins who pollute their surroundings and cause mayhem. They act pre-modern but earn no scorn because they are cool – they sport a sort of elite grunge that suggests that the environmental-studies major at Brown empathizes with those poor for whom grime is not makeup.

Identity is key here. In general, to win exemption from the left-wing critique of America, the affluent must construct cool identities as far distant as possible from the white Christian heterosexual male, who is most culpable for creating our present affluence from ill-gotten gains. The multimillionaire Elizabeth Warren and her husband make nearly $1 million a year. They live in a home beyond the reach of 99 percent of America. And she may well have plagiarized and been dishonest about her own heritage. No matter — Warren washed away both her privilege and her sins by reinventing herself as a “Cherokee” who fights Wall Street oppressors.

So too Barack Obama. It was Obama himself, not the fringe Birthers, who first made the case that the president was born in Kenya — not because he was, but because to say now and then that he was added an exotic touch of cool to Barack Hussein Obama — a cool that a Barry Dunham born in Honolulu and prepped at Punahou would have lacked. Poor George Zimmerman — had he only called himself Jorge Zimmerman he might not have been written off as a “white Hispanic” vigilante.

Network news anchors anguished over whether George W. Bush had tried coke while thousands of African-Americans languished in jail for doing the same — but they snored when Barack Obama boasted that he had done that and much more. Push down a gay student fifty years ago as a teen, and if you are straitlaced Mitt Romney then you always were a homophobe; push away a little girl decades ago, and if you are Barack Hussein Obama, then you were struggling with identity and coming of age.

In short, millions of well-off Americans, from
the entering college student to the full professor of law, from the billionaire thief to the president of the United States himself, endlessly chase cool.

And why would they not? Cool is now America’s holy grail that allows the elite and the rich not just to pursue and enjoy nice things, but to damn others who do the same.

You’d think the largest legal action in American history in defense of religious liberty would be a major news story. But ABC, CBS, and NBC don’t judge news events by their inherent importance as relates to the future of our freedoms. They deliver the news according to a simple formula: Does it, or doesn’t it, advance the re-election of Barack Obama?

If it doesn’t, it isn’t news.

On May 21, 43 Catholic dioceses and organizations sued the Obama administration over its ridiculously narrow idea of how a “religious institution” can be defined under their ObamaCare law. Never has the Catholic Church – or any order, for that matter – undertaken something of this magnitude. It’s truly jaw-dropping that ABC and NBC completely ignored this action on their evening newscasts, while “CBS Evening News” devoted just 19 seconds to this historic event.

No, let’s be blunt: They spiked the news.

This is the worst example of shameless bias by omission I have seen in the quarter-century history of the Media Research Center. We recall the Chinese communists withholding from its citizenry for 20 years the news that the U.S. had landed on the moon, because it reflected poorly on their government. Never, never would the U.S. “news” media behave thusly.

They just did.

This is not an honest mistake. It was not an editorial oversight by the broadcast networks. It did not occur too late for the evening deadline. This was a deliberate and insidious withholding of national news to protect the “Chosen One” who ABC, CBS and NBC have worked so hard to elect and for whom they are now abusing their journalistic influence. Even when CBS mentioned the suit ever-so-briefly, like so many others, they deliberately distorted the issue by framing it as a contraception lawsuit when it is much broader, a religious freedom issue – and they know it.

This should be seen as a very dark cloud on Obama’s political horizon. The Catholic Church, with 60 million Americans describing themselves as Catholic, has unleashed legal Armageddon on the administration, promising “we will not comply” with a health law that strips Catholics of their religious liberty. If this isn’t “news,” then there’s no such thing as news.

This should be leading newscasts and the subject of special, in-depth reports. So what trumped this story? ABC led their evening broadcast and devoted an incredible three minutes and 30 seconds to the sentencing of the Rutgers student who spied on his gay roommate with a web camera. NBC aired an entire story on a lunar eclipse. Both CBS and NBC devoted their first three and a half minutes to prostate-cancer screening.

Catholic taxpayers who help fund National Public Radio were also ignored on the evening newscast with that sad joke of a title – “All Things Considered.”

If only some deceased priest had been accused of sexual improprieties in 1953…then Catholics would be seen as newsworthy. These “news” operations can’t argue these are more important stories than the loss of religious freedom in America.

The print press isn’t much better. For the Washington Post, there was a little one-column story buried on page A6. That fishwrap known as USA Today had a really tiny headline and 128-word item at the very bottom of A2. The New York Times had a perfunctory 419-word dispatch on page A17.

Two pages later, the Times defined as “news” what it prefers to report on Catholics: “2 Philadelphia Priests Punished in Sexual Abuse Cases.” The paper noted one priest has been suspended from ministry for two years and the other had been placed on leave in December based on abuse that occurred about 40 years ago. This wasn’t really “news” as a current matter, but this is always and everywhere the bigoted narrative the Times prefers to perpetuate.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops used the word “horror” to describe what Team Obama is mandating. On the only broadcast show to give Catholics some coverage, CBS This Morning anchor Charlie Rose asked Dolan if the White House misled him on this issue. Dolan began by saying he hesitated to question the president’s sincerity – even though anyone who heard Obama’s 2009 commencement speech at Notre Dame about “honoring the conscience” of his opponents on abortion has proven he is completely insincere.

The cardinal said “I worry, Charlie, that members of his administration might not particularly understand our horror at the restrictive nature of this exemption that they’re giving us, that for the first time that we can remember, a bureau of the federal government seems to be radically intruding into the internal definition of what a church is. We can’t seem to get that across.”

He’s not finding much help getting anything across from those supposed “mediators” of the national press corps.

Yes, of course I do! I recently found out that one of my sisters had an abortion in high school. I was shocked to be honest with you. Hey, there are mamy reasons for why people do with they do, some much more understandable than others. I would venture to say that many abortions, though, are for one or another “inconvenience” reason. You hear people say “keep it legal, but rare.”. Yeah, millions of abortions per year is far from rare. Anyway, in my belief system, we all will have to answer for the things we have done throughout our lives. I am not the judge, nor do I want to be.

“I will not be won by weaklings
Subtle and suave and mild (like Obama)
But by men with the hearts of Vikings
And the simple faith of a child”–

Robert Service
The Law of The Yukon
———————

Why Jacksonians Do Not Like Barack Obama

by Michael Barone

Let me add a couple of thoughts to Sean Trende’s excellent Real Clear Politics column on Barack Obama’s weakness in the Scots-Irish zone of America. Trende uses Obama’s weak showings in the West Virginia, Kentucky and Arkansas primaries this month to make the larger point that this region, where Bill Clinton was competitive in 1992 and 1996, has now become very heavily Republican, offsetting or more than offsetting gains Democrats have made in the Mountain West states of New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado and (maybe) Arizona.

The Scots-Irish zone represents parts of America settled by the Scots-Irish who came across the Atlantic in huge numbers in the years 1763-75, just before the Revolution, and settled in the Appalachian ridges from southwest Pennsylvania to Upcountry South Carolina and then for three generations in a sort of drang nach southwest settled country going southwest and west to Texas and Oklahoma. The Scots-Irish zone is plainly visible if you make a map highlighting the counties where Hillary Clinton thrashed Barack Obama by the widest margins in 2008 (this also includes Hispanic counties in south Texas) or a map showing the counties where John McCain won a higher percentage of the vote in 2008 than George W. Bush had in 2004. There’s a big overlap here with the counties where, in response to the Census Bureau’s question about ancestry, the largest number of responses were “American.” The Scots-Irish didn’t regard themselves as immigrants and over the years have shown little interest in their lands of origin in Northern Ireland and Lowland Scotland. Technically they were not immigrants at all; they were people who moved from one fringe of the British Empire to another. Their identity as Americans came early. Andrew Jackson in his call for volunteers in Tennessee for the War of 1812 said, “We are free born sons of America, the citizens of the only republick [sic] now existing in the world; and the only people on earth who possess rights, liberties, and property which they dare call their own.” That’s the spirit that Walter Russell Mead in his wonderful book Special Providence describes as Jacksonian.

As historian David Hackett Fischer and Virginia Senator Jim Webb have pointed out in their accounts of the Scots-Irish, they are fighting peoples, willing to leave others alone if they are left alone, but if their families or their country are threatened they will fight to utterly exterminate their enemies. A belief in American exceptionalism, a determination to fight to what Franklin Roosevelt in his Pearl Harbor speech described as “absolute victory”: these are attitudes that are profoundly different from those of Barack Obama. Couple that with Jacksonians’ aversion to crony capitalism—as evident in Jackson’s speech explaining his veto of the rechartering of the Bank of the United States in 1832—and it is apparent that these people have plenty of reasons to vote against Obama other than a purported dislike of black people. And in assessing charges that they’re voting against him because of race, you might want to take into account the fact that Buchanan County in far southwest Virginia, adjoining both West Virginia and Kentucky, which voted 90%-9% for Clinton over Obama in 2008, back in 1989 voted 59%-41% for Douglas Wilder, the first black governor of Virginia. Scots-Irish Democrats are willing to vote for black candidates, just not for Obama.

A second point. In comparing the Mountain West and the Jacksonian bloc, Trende writes: “To be sure, the Mountain West states have been growing, while Greater Appalachia has been in decline. But it will take about 30 years before these Mountain West states, including Arizona, equal our Jacksonian states in terms of the Electoral College.” Actually, the Scots-Irish zone has not been in decline all that much lately. If you define it (differently from Trende) as the five states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas and Oklahoma, the region grew relatively little in the decades from 1940 to 1970 but has grown at just below the national average from 1970 to 2010. In the 1940-70 period these five states’ population grew only 12%, compared to the national gain of 54%. They went from 50 electoral votes in the 1940s to 39 electoral votes in elections from 1972 to 1980. In contrast, between 1970 and 2010 these five states’ population grew by 44%, not much below the national average of 53%. The number of electoral votes went from 39 in 1972-80 to 37 in 2010, a pretty minor drop.

The Mountain West has been growing much more rapidly and has been gaining electoral votes. But Trende is right in saying they’re not likely to catch up with Greater Appalachia any time soon. Defining the Mountain West as Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, Greater Appalachia outvoted the Mountain West in the electoral college by 50 to 17 in the 1940s, by 39 to 20 in 1972-80 and will outvote it 37 to 31 in 2012. With immigration from Mexico basically down to zero these days, Trende’s estimate of 30 years for the gap to be fully closed looks about right.

Wild and wide are my borders, stern as death is my sway;
From my ruthless throne I have ruled alone for a million years and a day;
Hugging my mighty treasure, waiting for man to come,
Till he swept like a turbid torrent, and after him swept — the scum.
The pallid pimp of the dead-line, the enervate of the pen,
One by one I weeded them out, for all that I sought was — Men.
One by one I dismayed them, frighting them sore with my glooms;
One by one I betrayed them unto my manifold dooms.
Drowned them like rats in my rivers, starved them like curs on my plains,
Rotted the flesh that was left them, poisoned the blood in their veins;
Burst with my winter upon them, searing forever their sight,
Lashed them with fungus-white faces, whimpering wild in the night;

“Staggering blind through the storm-whirl, stumbling mad through the snow,
Frozen stiff in the ice-pack, brittle and bent like a bow;
Featureless, formless, forsaken, scented by wolves in their flight,
Left for the wind to make music through ribs that are glittering white;
Gnawing the black crust of failure, searching the pit of despair,
Crooking the toe in the trigger, trying to patter a prayer;
Going outside with an escort, raving with lips all afoam,
Writing a cheque for a million, driveling feebly of home;
Lost like a louse in the burning . . . or else in the tented town
Seeking a drunkard’s solace, sinking and sinking down;
Steeped in the slime at the bottom, dead to a decent world,
Lost ‘mid the human flotsam, far on the frontier hurled;
In the camp at the bend of the river, with its dozen saloons aglare,
Its gambling dens ariot, its gramophones all ablare;
Crimped with the crimes of a city, sin-ridden and bridled with lies,
In the hush of my mountained vastness, in the flush of my midnight skies.
Plague-spots, yet tools of my purpose, so natheless I suffer them thrive,
Crushing my Weak in their clutches, that only my Strong may survive.

This
This all we need, more liberal BS…control the news and you control the message and you control the people…
***************

Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A) struck a deal this month to acquire 63 newspapers, said he may buy more publications as the industry rethinks whether to offer free content on the Interne
——————
Warren Buffet does a good imitation of Mr. McGoo. His partner Charlie Munger was the smart one. He proved it by keeping his mouth shut. I do have the trancript of a speech Munger gave at USC Business school 15 years ago, and it is obvious that he is the smart one. He would never allow a miscreant like Obama to lead him around by the nose like a trained panda bear. But Warren would.

Below, in our article, we note that many of Lichtman’s “keys” are now turning against Obama locking him out of a second term. Lichtman better button his pockets because it’s possible another “key” is dropping down the drain. Lichtman’s fourth key is “There is no significant third party challenge.”

And Lichtman, after Arkansas, Kentucky, West Virginia, North Carolina, etc. you should consider the growing talk from many who see the entire party flushed down the drain with Obama at the top of the ticket wondering Will Obama Pull an LBJ and Drop Out?

This si actually preety heartbreaking. Detroit use to be a vibrant city. This should not of happened…
**********************

Half Of Detroit’s Streetlights May Go Out As City Shrinks

By Chris Christoff – May 24, 2012 11:06 AM CT

Detroit Residents Stay In at Night as Lights Go Out
Detroit, whose 139 square miles contain 60 percent fewer residents than in 1950, will try to nudge them into a smaller living space by eliminating almost half its streetlights.
As it is, 40 percent of the 88,000 streetlights are broken and the city, whose finances are to be overseen by an appointed board, can’t afford to fix them. Mayor Dave Bing’s plan would create an authority to borrow $160 million to upgrade and reduce the number of streetlights to 46,000. Maintenance would be contracted out, saving the city $10 million a year.

Detroit goes dark, may go darker.

Other U.S. cities have gone partially dark to save money, among them Colorado Springs; Santa Rosa, California; and Rockford, Illinois. Detroit’s plan goes further: It would leave sparsely populated swaths unlit in a community of 713,000 that covers more area than Boston, Buffalo and San Francisco combined. Vacant property and parks account for 37 square miles (96 square kilometers), according to city planners.
“You have to identify those neighborhoods where you want to concentrate your population,” said Chris Brown, Detroit’s chief operating officer. “We’re not going to light distressed areas like we light other areas.”
Detroit’s dwindling income and property-tax revenue have required residents to endure unreliable buses and strained police services throughout the city. Because streetlights are basic to urban life, deciding what areas to illuminate will reshape the city, said Kirk Cheyfitz, co-founder of a project called Detroit143 — named for the 139 square miles of land, plus water — that publicizes neighborhood issues.
Rethinking Detroit
“It touches kids going to school in the dark,” said Cheyfitz, chief executive of Story Worldwide Ltd., a New York marketing company. “It touches midnight Mass at a church. It touches businesses that want to stay open past 9 p.m.”
Bing in 2010 began an independent project called Detroit Works to sort ideas on how to reconfigure the city for residences, businesses, green space and even agriculture, a plan due in August.
Meantime, Brown said, the city will fix broken streetlights in certain places even as it discontinues such services as street and sidewalk repairs in “distressed” areas — those with a high degree of blight and little or no commercial activity.
Bing’s plan requires state legislation to create the lighting authority. Governor Rick Snyder supports the plan, said his senior policy adviser, Valerie Brader.

Dark Portents

There’s already experience snuffing out streetlights within Detroit’s borders. Highland Park, a 3-square-mile city encircled by its larger neighbor, removed 1,100 of 1,600 streetlights last year, after piling up a $4 million debt to DTE Energy. The move saves $45,000 a month, said Alejandro Bodipo-Memba, a spokesman for the company.
Only major streets and intersections remain lit in the city of 12,000, once home to Chrysler Group LLC’s namesake car manufacturer and Henry Ford’s first moving assembly line. Mayor DeAndre Windom, 45, said residents at first complained, though few do now. He’s considering grants and private funding to relight darkened streets
Colorado Springs pulled the plug on 9,000 of its 25,600 lights in 2010 to save $1.3 million, said David Krauth, a city traffic engineer. Some were relit as revenue improved, though 3,500 remain dark, saving about $500,000 a year, he said.
In Detroit, some streets have no working lights. Many appear dim or are blocked by trees. And some areas with mostly vacant lots are well-lit.
Night Terrors
A single, broken streetlight on the northeast side brings fear to Cynthia Perry, 55. It hasn’t worked for six years, Perry said in an interview on the darkened sidewalk where she walks from her garage to her house entrance.
“I’m afraid coming in at night,” she said. “I’m not going to seclude myself in the house and never go anywhere.”
In southwest Detroit, businesses on West Vernor Highway, a main commercial thoroughfare, have sought $4 million in private grants to fix the situation themselves. The state would pay $2.5 million, said Kathy Wendler, president of the Southwest Detroit Business Association.
Jamahl Makled, 40, said he’s owned businesses in southwest Detroit for about two decades, most recently cell-phone stores. He said they’ve have been burglarized more than a dozen times.
“In the dark, criminals are comfortable,” Makled said. “It’s not good for the economy and the safety of the residents.”

Antique Lamps

North of there, on a stretch of West Grand Boulevard, the bases of light poles show where thieves tore out the wiring.
As many as 15,000 Detroit streetlights use 1920s technology, according to a 2010 study by McKinsey & Co. Upgrading the system would cost $140 million to $200 million, and $5 million more to operate than the $23 million now spent annually, the report said.
Besides streetlights, the Detroit lighting department provides electricity to 144 customers that include Detroit schools, Wayne State University and local government offices. Almost 22 percent of the city’s electric bills were unpaid, the McKinsey report said.
That’s just one reason Detroit is digging out of a $265 million deficit and saddled with more than $12 billion in long- term debt. To avoid a state takeover, Detroit agreed in April to have its finances overseen by a nine-member board appointed by the city and the state.

Civic Obligations

Delivering services to a thinly spread population is expensive. Some 20 neighborhoods, each a square mile or more, are only 10 to 15 percent occupied, said John Mogk, a law professor at Wayne State University who specializes in urban law and policy. He said the city can’t force residents to move, and it’s almost impossible under Michigan law for the city to seize properties for development.
Mogk said landowners can demand many times what property would fetch on the open market.
“There are tremendous political, administrative, financial and, to some degree, legal obstacles,” Mogk said. “Unless you phase out a neighborhood altogether, you still need lighting, and waste pickup and police and fire protection.”
As Detroit’s streets go dark, some of those neighborhoods may fade away with the dying light.

I just cannot take Obama seriously. He does not know shit from shinola. He is a talking head, and nothing more. This little jewel from his underattended campaign stop in Denver where he presumes to tell us what Romney is really about. I doubt he has ever met Romney. And when he says Romney does not know about the real world, all he is really saying is he did not build his presidential aspirations around being a community organizer who was willing to accept bribes if the price was right.

we know that Gingrich is heavily in debt…but something tells me he is trolling msnbc for a pundit/consultant gig…did not get a chance to watch it, but sure enough, there G was yukking it up with Matthews…i won’t be surprised…if he appears again on msnbc then you know he is auditioning

Two difficult weeks for President Obama have shaken the overwhelming confidence of his campaign in Chicago and of Democratic leaders in Washington, and prompted a depressing realization: This is, at best, 2004, not 1996. At worst it’s 1992.

Democrats had taken comfort for months in the Republican Party’s seeming inability to get behind Mitt Romney, Obama’s healthy lead in the polls, and equally healthy job growth. And for a few, fleeting, moments, Democrats thought the election might just be easy. But Republican division appears to have been merely an artifact of primary politics, and Mitt Romney has proved a consistent, if unglamorous campaigner.

And this week, amid poor economic indicators and continuing voter frustration, Democrats returned to the harsh reality that this election is going to be anything but a walk in the park.

“There was this sense maybe a month or two ago that Obama was really riding high — that he had gotten his base behind him and the economy was doing better and it had this Clinton vs. Bob Dole 1996 feeling — that he was going to cruise,” said one 2008 Obama aide who does not work for this year’s campaign. “And now it feels like it’s going to be really tough — a 2004 race.” [snip]

Now, nobody’s laughing.

Moreover, a campaign that two months ago seemed infallible has proven to be very capable of making mistakes. Obama’s aides were taken aback when Vice President Joe Biden publicly backed same sex marriage — and spent a week punishing him for speaking out in the press. Long preparation for attacks on Romney’s time at Bain Capital, aimed at changing the narrative , nevertheless left them flat-footed when Republicans (and even a few Democrats) counter-attacked. Romney, who stumbled into the Republican nomination, scored his first tactical victory of the general election and further shored up the Republican base in the process.

“The attacks on Bain have the consequence of seeming to unite the party behind Romney, and that makes this attack perhaps a little clumsy,” said the former Obama aide. [snip]

Critics inside the party and out, however, warn that Obama has a deeper problem: He hasn’t clearly communicated a simple rationale for a second term.

“They have no clear message or overarching theme other than class warfare and attack politics,” pollster Doug Schoen told BuzzFeed. ”They don’t have a vision for the second term. No clear sense as to what the Administration is offering for a second term. There is widespread dissatisfaction with both parties and both candidates in primary results [Tuesday] — and no clear idea how Obama is going to unite the county and lead us forward.”

In 1968, the political world was shocked when President Lyndon Johnson, running for reelection just four years after a landslide victory, was held beneath 50% of the vote in the Democrat primary in New Hampshire. Sen. Eugene McCarthy scored a shocking 41.5% of the vote against the incumbent President.

The result confirmed Johnson’s weakness going into the November general election. Within weeks, Sen. Robert Kennedy announced he would seek the Democrat nomination for President and Johnson announced that he would not. LBJ was bowing out of his reelection bid.

Today, the Obama reelection campaign is reeling from his disastrous performance in the Democrat primaries in Arkansas and Kentucky. [snip]

Mind you, Sen. McCarthy was a serious candidate running on an increasingly popular anti-war message. Obama, by contrast, just lost 40% of the Democrat vote to a guy in prison, an unknown lawyer, and, well, a ghost, essentially. Losing 40% of the vote to “uncommitted” from your own party ought to make one rethink their campaign.

I remember back in 1992, when the media went into a feeding frenzy over Pat Buchanan’s 37% showing against Bush 41 in New Hampshire. For weeks, we heard that the primary result in the Granite State showed Bush’s reelection effort was in serious jeopardy. Buchanan, who was also, unlike Obama’s primary opponents recently, a serious, well-known and media savy candidate, evidenced, for the media at the time, how out of touch Bush was with his political base. The media told us, essentially, that Bush’s reelection campaign was failing.

Ok, setting aside their ability then to generate self-fulfilling prophecies, the media kind of got that one right.

Of course, I don’t think Obama will have the self-awareness of LBJ and drop out of the Presidential campaign. And, I certainly don’t believe the media will revisit their old contention that an incumbent president losing 40% of his own party’s vote is a sign of vulnerability. I expect they’ll sweep it under the rug and pretend it doesn’t mean anything special.

But. It. Did. Happen. And, it has a significant bearing on this Fall’s election. Obama obviously never had a serious chance of winning Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia in November. But, the results in these states suggest that Obama has a serious problem with a significant portion of his Democrat base. Remember, this wasn’t a poll or survey of Democrats. They had to actively go to the polls and vote in a race that was largely uncontested.

That is some serious initiative. From Democrats. To vote against Obama. Message received.

Admin
…and no clear idea how Obama is going to unite the county and lead us forward.”

——-
They don’t think Barry knows how to drive the Bus to avoid the cliff…

Which means, all of Hillary’s army is at least 4 years more intelligent than any Obama supporter. They keep clapping and saying, “We believe in Tinkerbell. . Obama…but he never accomplishes anything as a leader.

I like your update, admin. I’ve been saying for ages that a Libertarian candidate would hurt the Dems MUCH more than the Repubs, even though “accepted wisdom” said the opposite. Several polls seem to indicate I was right.

Oh, I agree that the GOP left a lot. That was the conservatives BIGGEST bone of contention with Bush and the previous congress – his spending. Why do you think today’s conservatives are trying to toss out the old guard every chance they get? They are sick of that crap.

But Obama is now trying to spin that he is spending less than Bush did, and is industriously setting the budget to rights. That’s a laugh riot, right there.

On May 21, 43 Catholic dioceses and organizations sued the Obama administration over its ridiculously narrow idea of how a “religious institution” can be defined under their ObamaCare law. Never has the Catholic Church

===================

Oh, my goodness, isn’t their hair on fire!

Better we should take away all the subs-, er, preferential tax treatment of all the churches. If they want to sue the government that gives them their grants and their special tax status, let them pay their own lawyers.

my niece who got pregnant in her junior year. She is raising her son (a very cute kid) while living in my sister’s home. My sister and b-i-l are providing the financial/material support. My niece is 19, and per a
conversation with my sister today, my niece will be looking for work this summer. They all juggle their schedules around the boy. It is a family effort, not a
government one.

=======================

How old is the boy? Was she or the family eligible for some government benefits but turned them down?

gonzo, I’m going back on “ignore” mode. Every time we start tentatively engaging, because we’d like to have actual conversation, someone takes it as permission to go off the constant sniping and combative deep end again. He/She doesn’t want to converse, or even debate. Just play games and revel in a spoiler role.

I’m done. I may leave altogether, because I’m just fucking sick of the constant sniping and picking at every irrelevant non-point, and the demands for answers to ceaseless nonsensical questions, many of them personal. It’s deliberate badgering, poking and prodding, constantly. And frankly I think He/She enjoys it, and think He/She is having a great private chuckle over it all.

ADMIN, you can ban me if you want, but I am sick to death of the CONSTANT shit-stirring that is obviously done for no other reason than just shit-stirring. So I’m going to say this once, then I’m done.

Turndownobama: You truly are a despicable piece of crap. You are not interested in conversation. You are not interested in answers. You are interested in seeing just how much you can poke and prod and needle to get a rise out of people.

You, turndown, are a fucking troll. Go crawl under a rock. I’d rather leave this board than have to put up with your snide little too-cute-for-school childish games anymore. You are veeeery careful about it. You know the line, you know the rules, and you are the pissy little adolescent who deliberately and constantly walks as close to it as you can get, just to fucking annoy, just to fucking provoke, and then step back all wide-eyed and say, “What?? I was inside the line!” You are the Eddie Haskell of this blog, but smarmier, and not as amusing. Fuck off.

ADMIN – please feel free to ban me now, I really don’t care. She has gotten on the last nerve of half this board, and she does it deliberately.

You still don’t get it TD, it shouldn’t cost taxpayers anything. It is the responsibility of the person having the child. Period. And please don’t cry me a river “what if they are 13 years old”. WTF is a 13 y/o doing having sex? The families are responsible, not the schools to set morals and expectations and not me to pay for their lifelong mistake that I hope they learn to love and cherish. The two families can raise that child. Sorry,it’s called personal responsibility and no one learns it by government handouts.

You chose to share your personal experience, so I carefully and impersonally asked for a few more details. Gonzo same about her niece. Those were relevant details. Your stories had little point in the discussion without them.

Also, the story of Romney’s dog isn’t clear without some more details. It might have been done safely and comfortablly for the dog, or it might not. We need those details to know which it was.

@ gonzotx – Well, if Admin lets me stay (and he/she may not, and that’s her right) I pledge to never, ever, under any circumstances, not even when TD does her usual “let me sound reasonable for a week to sucker them back in” ploy, respond to the troll again. Ever. I have tried and tried, and have also defended her in the past, but it becomes clearer and clearer what her strategy is every time we go through the cycle.

This person does not exist anymore as far as I’m concerned. But if it continues to be a problem with the constant picking and latching onto tiny, insignificant, wasn’t-even-the-point excerpts of everything anyone says, I may leave anyway, even if I am not involved. Life is too short, and my country is in too much trouble, to waste my time having to scroll past her petty games.

Oh, and ADMIN? I really wish you’d give some thought to this. There have been repeated issues on this board, and curiously, this person is almost always involved. Even when she wasn’t technically the one “at fault”. Everyone here has not always responded in the best way (for instance, I probably didn’t above), but it does become more and more evident over time what is really going on.

You know that kid that really loves to push the other kids’ buttons? And is damn sneaky about it? So that they always end up the one looking all innocent when another kid smacks ’em? Yeah, that’s her. The problem is, that tactic works fine the first 2 or three times it happens. But eventually, people begin to notice who is doing the actual provoking, going out of her way to garner that response so she can be smug when she gets exactly what she was shooting for.

we know that Gingrich is heavily in debt…but something tells me he is trolling msnbc for a pundit/consultant gig…did not get a chance to watch it, but sure enough, there G was yukking it up with Matthews…i won’t be surprised…if he appears again on msnbc then you know he is auditioning
——————
I doubt it. If he does then we will know for sure what he is about. I think he is too principled for that. Going on their show is one thing. Working for an organization that is singularly devoted to destroying this country is not what I believe he is about. There is too much water under the bridge for that. If he were to accept an offer from them–I am quite sure they would want to have him, then he would have to worry about the same fate as Buchanan. The only way I would do it is if Griffin pulled his usual shit on me I could tear out his liver–and I would want that in writing attested to by two competent witnesses–which of course excludes tinker bell Matthews.

wbboei, Tweetie was all affronted that he is well-remembered for his leg tingle. It was painful to watch him try to talk his way around it by claiming he was experiencing a thrill for his country, not Obama. Sorry, Tweetie, but the drool and the rapt adoration on your face gave it away. Preserved for posterity.

—————-
Yes, I saw it too. But it was all an act. It is impossible for a man like Matthews–who has no shame, no decency and no compassion to feel ANY bona fide sense of effrontery. He belongs to the insect phylum which includes maggots and tape worms and Bill Maher.

Another horrible incident being portrayed by OWS as terrible police brutality, as a police van just deliberately tries to run over protestors.

Terrible, horrible cops, just gunning it and trying to run down completely innocent protesters who are doing nothing more than desperately try to stay out of the way. I mean, it’s obvious how they are not at all trying to block the van, or bang on the sides,or interfere, or shine lights in the eyes of the cops so they can’t see, or block the road, or purposefully TRYING to get in front of it hoping for some good “brutality” footage.

It brung a tear to my eye. Those poor, poor innocent and peaceful children. What pigs those fascist cops are.

I am sick and tired of skipping over so many of her/his posts to keep from getting angry, strange that this person should have been banned from the personal attack rule when he/ she said, to me, “FU”. I didn’t forget it and I have no reason to.

I was over at Daily Howler and it no longer worth reading. But there was an article about how little EJ Dionne whose appeal I could never understand holds forth about what Bain did–looting the pension funds–after Romney was gone. One question: had little EJ ever dealt personally with Bain? No. I can tell you for a fact that I have and they are not evil incarnate. Their greatest sin is they take what you tell them and parrot it back to top management like it was their own idea. I dealt with them for six months, and was never all that impressed. Young HBR people paid $150 per hour to come up with ideas for failing companies. But lack of first hand knowledge never stops those like EJ who just love to spout off.

under the benign tutelage of Mayor Mike Bloomberg aka lame duck, Jeremiah Wright grade school on the upper east side will be teaching Arabic to its students. As such, one of the first things the youngsters will undoubtedly learn is pithy little sayings like death to infidels and there is only one god Allah and Mohammed is his prophet. Chalk it all up to Mayor Bloombergs call for diversity and tolerance.

wbboei, what the naysayers fail to ever mention is that there were a lot MORE pension funds invested in Bain itself, than there were at the few (5%) companies that failed. So Bain should have “gone down with the ship”, so to speak, and trashed all those pension funds invested in them, in order to save the one from the bankrupt company? Of course, if they had, then all those pension funds could have sued Bain’s ass off, since for Bain to do that would be blatantly illegal under current law.

Bain had a legal fiduciary responsibility to its investors, NOT to the employees of the companies in which it invested. And no, MOST of the money invested in Bain is not the personal wealth of fat cat billionaires. It is the 401k’s and pension funds of very ordinary people. If the company managing my 401k deliberately let it go to hell, to just “out of the goodness of their heart” help out some steel mill employees, which is what they are suggesting Bain should have done, I’d be pretty pissed off.

These idiots have no freaking clue how investment capital works in the real world, or how the parts and pieces interact, and where whose responsibility lies. At all.

Honestly, in response to this turn of events, I just feel like screaming a string of celebratory expletives. That’s how I feel. Hillary Clinton popped her collar to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations committee. Popped her collar! What the fuck is happening? First she spawned the meme of the month, then she told everyone to go fuck themselves as far as whether or not she wears make-up, and now this.

First, Obama says he was born in Hawaii, then he says he was born in Kenya, then he says he was born in Hawaii and at one point he said it is all just murky. The only thing he has not said yet–but being a constitutional law professor and nobel prize winner is it is hearsay, since he has not recollection of being borne, and must therefor accept what others with first hand knowledge have told him, and since they are all dead, who are we to say different?

Question to Messiah Obama: Sir, concerning your place of birth, were you lying then, are you lying now, or are you not in fact a chronic and habitual liar?

HillaryforTexas
May 25th, 2012 at 1:54 am
————-
Correct: it is the michael moore aka Java the Hut school of business analysis which is unprincipled socialist practiced by an unprincipled waste of protoplasm, but my god is he fat.

I was chairman of a fundraising event at Sun Valley many years ago, and introduced Mike Oxley among other luminaries. I did a little research on him in the Encyclopedia of American Politics, said a few words, and then did what you should always do in those situations, step back and let the guest have the stage. He gave a short speech, and I noticed what an intense man he was, not very personable. If I had had any inkling of what he would turn out to be, i.e. sponsor of Sarbanes Oxley which is a terrible regulatory burden on corporations which they pass on to their customers in terms of increased costs for goods and services, I might have denied him the podium. That is one of the things Schumpter spoke about in that piece I posted above from The Economist. And I think about that particularly when I think of Michael Moore whose assault on the public corporation simply furthers the process of moving into more secretive forms of capitalism where there is no transparency. I can tell you this much. If I were advising a client whether to form a corporation or an LLC today it would be the latter for that very reason. But in the macro sense that is a bad thing for society.

wbboei, I have no problem with clear, relatively simple regulation to keep businesses honest. But over the past decade or so, what has been taking place is nothing other than a bait and switch.

Govt latches onto a perceived problem or inequity, which may or my not be a real problem, but often it is. They announce with great fanfare that by gosh by golly they are going to DO SOMETHING about that! We are going to have us some by God REGULATION up in here! The crowds applaud. Then they proceed to get in a closed room with the biggest players in the sector they are attempting to regulate, and coming up with some convoluted, twisted monstrosity of “regulation” that consists mostly of payoffs and loopholes and market-gaming for the politically favored, and increasing burden on the not-so-politically connected firms.

The original problem was, of course, not solved. So what do we need? Why, we need us some more REGULATION, by God! Wash, rinse, repeat.

At some point one begins balking when one next hears the “we need more regulation!” drumbeat starting up again. And of course, then you get told that you are an evil evil person who wants no restraints or sensible laws governing business at all. No, I’m not. I am, however, viewing your newest latest and greatest version of “regulation” with a wary eye, since you’ve proven to be a lying liar.

When the regulatory structure is such a burdensome mess that the easiest and quickest route to prosperity is to get in bed with the govt, guess what business will do? Business goes where the profit is. If courting the govt is the path to wealth, because the govt has a stranglehold on who gets to do business freely and who is burdened, then they’d be stupid not to go all out to buy themselves some congressmen.

The OWS crowd recognizes many of the symptoms, but has the cause backwards. The problem isn’t that evil corporations have “bought our govt”. The problem is that our govt has left corporations no choice but to invest in currying favor if they wish to do profitable business. Corporations have no interest in “ruling the world” – their interest is making money. It is our govt who has set up the playing field such that money cannot be made unless you pay off the rule-makers. Because the rule-makers will make or break you on the mega-corporation level. They can “regulate” in your favor, or not.

Gonzo– I had coffee today with the arbitrator and he opened up with me a little bit about his experiences in the Korean War–he is 83. He joined the 101st Airborne aka the screaming eagles, and his unit was later merged with elements of the 82nd Airborne to get a combat ready unit. He said when they got to Korea, they had none of the right equipment or clothing for the winter conditions they would be facing. He had a BAR (armor piercing Browning automatic rifle which was mounted on a podium). The soldiers blamed Ike for the lack of foresight and lousy intelligence even thought dug out dug MacArthur was theoretically in charge. He said the intelligence was so bad that his unit was dropped inadvertently in no mans land and was fired upon by both sides. He said they faced wave after wave of attacks by the Chinese. He won not one but two silver stars in the ensuing combat. Fragging was a common phenomenon among our troops and nobody wanted to be a second lieutenant. He served under a colonel named Loomis whom everybody admired. I googled the name tonight and see that this was a military family that went all the way back to the American Revolution and served with Washington himself. He told me that 1951 or 2 was the coldest winter on record in Korea and when he would go to wake up soldiers in the morning several of them he knew were frozen dead. The Chinese troops came at them in waves and eventually his position was overrun and all of them–Colonel Loomis included were captured. He was interred in a prisoner of war camp and every morning the guards would stand on the grating and urinate down into the American troops. He has two fingers missing and I do not know how it happened. He will not speak of it. If you ever saw the movie Go Tell The Spartans starring Bert Lancaster there is a memorable line where Lancaster compares the glory of being with Patton in world war II and feeling the exhilaration of an army on the move with the agony of being an army pinned down in a fixed position like in Viet Nam and a target for snipers,sudden overwhelming attacks, and as LBJ so aptly put it a limited war for limited objectives. And before Viet Nam there was Korea. The arbitrator concluded by marveling at how many thousands of excellent young men lost their lives in that perilous ordeal and wondered what is what it was all for. Dulce et decorum est pro patrie mori doesn’t cut it.

Disappoints abound here. Obama up to old tricks. Mayor Nutter circling the black wagons. Only plus is that WaPo reported it. h/t to whitehousedossier for noticing it all.

Hecklers mar Romney’s visit to inner-city charter school in Philadelphia – The Washington Post
snip
Outside, meanwhile, some brick row houses across from the school were boarded up. Police had cordoned off a full city block to protect Romney and his entourage. Residents, some of them organized by Obama’s campaign, stood on their porches and gathered at a sidewalk corner to shout angrily at Romney. Some held signs saying, “We are the 99%.” One man’s placard trumpeted an often-referenced Romney gaffe: “I am not concerned about the very poor.”Madaline G. Dunn, 78, who said she has lived here for 50 years and volunteers at the school, said she is “personally offended” that Romney would visit her neighborhood.“It’s not appreciated here,” she said. “It is absolutely denigrating for him to come in here and speak his garbage.”Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter (D) addressed protesters and the media, quipping that Romney “suddenly somehow found West Philadelphia.It’s nice that he decided this late in his [campaign] to see what a city like Philadelphia is about,” Nutter said. But, he added, “I don’t know that a one-day experience in the heart of West Philadelphia is enough to get you ready to run the United States of America.You want to have an urban experience?” Nutter added. “You want to have a West Philly experience? Then come out here and talk to somebody in West Philly.”
Philadelphia’s district attorney, Seth Williams, said Romney does not understand the plight of urban America and was hiding from “real Americans.”
“Instead of just talking at the school and getting back on his huge bus, he should come out, he should walk 60th Street, he should talk to folks who are out here that are mad so maybe he could understand how real Americans, those that live here in urban America, the issues that are important to us,” Williams said.Although Romney has not focused on the black community in his campaign so far, his father, George, reached out to African Americans and pursued policies designed to help lift blacks out of poverty during his service as governor of Michigan and secretary of Housing and Urban Development as well as in his 1968 presidential campaign.
sniphttp://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/romney-visits-inner-city-charter-school-in-philadelphia-in-outreach-to-black-voters/2012/05/24/gJQAWBWYnU_blog.html?hpid=z2

PS to Madaline: I am personally offended each time President Obama sets foot anywhere in Pennsylvania.

Is everyone wondering when the white coats will be coming?
Drudge has him pictured in a cornfield. Headline: A Cowpie of distortion
Mitt Romney gave Iowans a “cowpie of distortion” when he said he knows how to douse the nation’s “prairie fire of debt,” President Barack Obama said in his first campaign event in Iowa of this election cycle.http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120525/NEWS09/305250025/1001/
Top left of Drudge page is a Politico piece: Obama stumbles out of the gate.

HillaryforTexas
May 25th, 2012 at 12:11 am
A-damn-men.
I stopped reading comments and just read Admin and for some reason clicked this AM on comments. Shit stirring is the only way to describe it all. Most of it doesn’t even make sense. It is a diversion from genuine discussion by rationale people done to irritate and make reading comments a pain in the behind rather than a pleasure. I have thought in the past it was cry for help as in for attention or meds. Whatever. I will still read Admin but loony comments NO.

Obama stumbles out of the gate reads the headline? Impossible you say. This, from the Advertising Age marketing campaign man of the year, the campigner of the century, the media darling of the milenium and his wily coyote side kick snidely whiplash Axelrod, you say? Well a day. Lets put it to verse . . .

The Outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day:
The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play.
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.

A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought, if only Casey could get but a whack at that –
We’d put up even money, now, with Casey at the bat.

But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake,
And the former was a lulu and the latter was a cake;
So upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat,
For there seemed but little chance of Casey’s getting to the bat.

But Flynn let drive a single, to the wonderment of all,
And Blake, the much despis-ed, tore the cover off the ball;
And when the dust had lifted, and the men saw what had occurred,
There was Jimmy safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third.

Then from 5,000 throats and more there rose a lusty yell;
It rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell;
It knocked upon the mountain and recoiled upon the flat,
For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat.

There was ease in Casey’s manner as he stepped into his place;
There was pride in Casey’s bearing and a smile on Casey’s face.
And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,
No stranger in the crowd could doubt ’twas Casey at the bat.

Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt;
Five thousand tongues applauded when he wiped them on his shirt.
Then while the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip,
Defiance gleamed in Casey’s eye, a sneer curled Casey’s lip.

And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the air,
And Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.
Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped-
“That ain’t my style,” said Casey. “Strike one,” the umpire said.

From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled roar,
Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore.
“Kill him! Kill the umpire!” shouted someone on the stand;
And its likely they’d a-killed him had not Casey raised his hand.

With a smile of Christian charity great Casey’s visage shone;
He stilled the rising tumult; he bade the game go on;
He signaled to the pitcher, and once more the spheroid flew;
But Casey still ignored it, and the umpire said, “Strike two.”

“Fraud!” cried the maddened thousands, and echo answered fraud;
But one scornful look from Casey and the audience was awed.
They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain,
And they knew that Casey wouldn’t let that ball go by again.

The sneer is gone from Casey’s lip, his teeth are clenched in hate;
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate.
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey’s blow.

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville – mighty Casey has struck out.

Mitt Romney gave Iowans a “cowpie of distortion” when he said he knows how to douse the nation’s “prairie fire of debt,”
——————–
The Scarlet Pimperel strikes. By day he is one folksy son of a bitch. By night he turns into batman, convenes with the hoy paloy and turns up his nose like Benito Mussolini at the bitter clinging people in the hinterland. One video of that little ooops in San Fran where we caught him with his pants down around his knees will tell you who is really planting cow pies in Iowa–land of the truly stupid. They are the numbnutzes who voted for him in the 2008 primary–remember? It was not all barbarians from Chicago.

“I don’t know that a one-day experience in the heart of West Philadelphia is enough to get you ready to run the United States of America.You want to have an urban experience?”
————————
It matters if you are running for mayor of Philadelphia. But if you are running for President of the United States it is not the determining factor. What are you really going to learn from spending large amounts of time in West Philadelphia–I have been there. I have also been to Cabrini Green. There is a sameness to it all and the answers to their problems will not be found in that venue. The answers will come if we can jump start the economic engine of this nation. I would rather see him spend his time in Washington moving law makers–something that goldbricking Obama is unwilling to do. I have no idea why they sent Romney in there. Years ago I was working on a project with Eddy Mahe who was Chairman of the RNC. We were working on a national program and he counselled me to not waste time in venues where the door was closed to what we were proposing.

One thing that is hard for me to understand is how people can become yellow dogs–willing to vote for a yellow dog as long as the word democrat is under his name. It was easy for me to break ranks with the Republicans when they nominated Bush. I never understood how some people could turn a blind eye to the facts and pretend. Magic thinking I guess. If you believe in the small government principles of the Republican Party or the pro middle class values of the Democratic Party how in the hell can you support a candidate who takes money to undermine those values every day, and treats you like a mushroom–in the dark and feeding you shit. If you believe in those values, your first obligation is to not support the pretender to the throne–or be bamboozed into saying the alternative is worst. That is a faustian pact.

HillaryforTexas
May 25th, 2012 at 12:11 am
A-damn-men.
I stopped reading comments and just read Admin and for some reason clicked this AM on comments. Shit stirring is the only way to describe it all. Most of it doesn’t even make sense. It is a diversion from genuine discussion by rationale people done to irritate and make reading comments a pain in the behind rather than a pleasure. I have thought in the past it was cry for help as in for attention or meds.
_____________

Philadelphia’s district attorney, Seth Williams, said Romney does not understand the plight of urban America and was hiding from “real Americans.”
———————
Bullshit. We spent a trillion dollars on the Great Society Program in the 1960s. In today’s dollars that equates to 6 trillion–which is 40% of our national debt. We created a scheme of racial preferences, and the country elected a charlatan who happens to be half black. And what do we have to show for it? The only answer is the kind of stuff that Jack Kemp, Bill and Magic Johnson have talked about over the years–enterprise zones based on a capitalist model whereas Obama and his ilk favor the plantation model of dependency. If Cory Booker did not know that before, he does now.

Mayor Nutter’s role in this really surprised me. Perhaps he was attempting to appease too many groups? But now that another AA with authority in the area is chiming in to roll up whatever welcome mat Mitt may have thought was there, the racist element is thick enough to be cut with a knife.

I googled Seth Williams and got this gem:
With more than 75 percent of the vote Seth became the first African American District Attorney in the city of brotherly lovehttp://www.phila.gov/districtattorney/
Well now. Another first. Redefining what brotherly love really means in Philly. Home of the New Black Panthers whom Holder excused. How twisted it all has become.

I worked for Hillary in Scranton. There was one AA traveling with her people. He was the one who told us that BO had booked every one of the rooms in a hotel a few blocks away. None of us considered that to be palatable but leaders did not come forth to object and hostilities amongst the unwashed of us were stifled. Not the case with the other ethnicity, is it.

Well at least Mitt can say he tried to meet, greet and discuss only to be informed that he was not welcome. A great reason not to do it again. With impunity.

wbb I don’t know that I’ve ever enjoyed ‘Casey’ more than I did this morning.

In 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson inaugurated his “War on Poverty,” he travelled to the heart of coal country in eastern Kentucky, one of the poorest regions in the country. It was, until recently, most reliably Democratic: In the 20th century when Democrats won the presidency, they almost always won Kentucky, thanks to strong support from the east.

But in 2008, John McCain won Kentucky by nearly 20 points, thanks to a very strong showing in the historically Democratic parts of the state, which also backed Bush over Kerry in 2004 and split between Bush and Gore in 2000. And on Tuesday night, in the Democratic presidential primary, Obama was thoroughly embarrassed, losing over 40 percent to the choice of “Uncomitted.”

There is a similar story to tell all throughout the Border South – in “Greater Appalachia,” as it is known, the states that run west with the Ohio River then south with the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. And what is so interesting is that the demographics of this region have been stable over the last few decades: There is the same basic type of voter in the region now as there was 30 years ago.

It’s just that now he does not vote for the Democrats anymore.

Sean Trende and Michael Barone recently explained these trends, and I recommend you read both. Today, I want to zoom up to 30,000 feet to make an argument about what the loss of Appalachia says about the modern Democratic party.

The whole point of the Democratic party, since its inception in the 1820s, was to fight the battle of the people versus the powerful. The “humble members of society,” as Andrew Jackson called them, would align against the moneyed interests.

This is why the Democrats could regularly count not only on the support of Appalachia, but also on much of the poor, rural people in the Farm Belt and the Mountain West. For instance, Wyoming backed William Jennings Bryan in 1896, Woodrow Wilson twice, FDR three times, and Truman and LBJ. Hardly any “moneyed interests” there. The same goes for a state like Oklahoma, a reliably Democratic state through 1964.

But now they’ve all gone Republican, strongly so. And so also has Appalachia. Why?

Liberals will scoff and – to varying degrees – blame racism. But that’s really just a red herring. Sure, the absurd margins by which Obama has lost these areas point to race as a partial cause, but that does not explain the broader trend: All across the country, the “humble members of society” who once powered the Democratic party to overwhelming victories have abandoned it.

And why might that be? For a long time, liberals have argued in the idiom of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? These voters, they say, have been snookered by the GOP’s class- and race-baiting rhetoric.

I see things differently. In Spoiled Rotten: How the Politics of Patronage Corrupted the Once Noble Democratic Party and Now Threatens the American Republic, I argue that these Appalachian voters (and others like them all across the country) understand what has happened better than the liberal intelligentsia does. They perceive that the Democratic party is no longer the “party of the people,” as it was with Jackson, FDR, Truman, or LBJ. Instead, it’s now home to a slew of powerful special interest groups – certain unions (largely in the government), big city politicos, the vast panoply of upper class liberal interest groups, big business, the trial lawyers, and so on. The “people versus the powerful” rhetoric of the party during every presidential campaign is belied by what it actually does when it gets its hands on the government, and happily goes about rewarding those special groups within its coalition at the expense of the public interest.

And the people in Appalachia and the Farm Belt who no longer vote Democratic suffer insult to injury: Their defections from the party banner are explained away as being due to some form of false-consciousness; the poor fools have been so bewitched by the GOP that they cannot even perceive their true interests.

That kind of explanation is literally the inverse of Old Hickory’s view of the country, and it stands in stark contrast to the leadership the Democratic party up through the 1960s. The common folk were privileged over the wealthy and well-connected, and if the Democrats of the 1940s saw their margins collapse within the white working class as has happened to today’s party, I can assure you their leadership class would be asking what’s the matter with the us, not what’s the matter with Kansas!

So, it makes sense to me that Kentucky and Utah would vote for Harry Truman in 1948 but not Barack Obama in 2008. And no, race had little to do with it, in my opinion. It gets down to a simple question: for whom does the Democratic party stand? Ask the average Kentucky voter, or Oklahoma voter, or Utah voter, whose grandparents were proud Truman voters, and they’ll all tell you the same thing: It certainly isn’t the humble members of society.

Two weeks after an imprisoned felon received 41 percent of the vote against President Obama in West Virginia’s presidential primary, Arkansas could provide another potential embarrassment for the incumbent.

That’s because only Obama and John Wolfe, a Tennessee lawyer, are on the Democratic presidential primary ballot in the Razorback State. (Wolfe took 12 percent — and nearly 18,000 votes — in a four-way fight in the Louisiana Democratic presidential primary in late March.) And a recent independent poll showed Obama running just seven points ahead of Wolfe in the southern Arkansas 4th district, which covers one-quarter of the state.

The GOP surge in Dixie has really happened in three phases over the years.

The first phase was in “New South” cities – places like Dallas and Tampa. This is what powered Dwight Eisenhower to a strong showing in Dixie in 1952 and 1956. It helps explain why the longest-running GOP states in the South have been places like Florida and Virginia.

The second phase we really see after passage of the Civil Rights Act and the movement of the Deep South states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to the GOP. These states did not bail on the Democrats because the Republicans promised to go back to Jim Crow; rather, their only tie to the Democratic party was based on the old segregationist regime. Whites in these states were naturally quite conservative, and without the special deal the Democrats had given them on civil rights, they start moving Republican, really as early as 1964.
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These voters form the core of the GOP coalition in the South up through the late 1980s. The Democrats still held their own outside the Deep South and the New South – specifically, in the Border South states that had relatively small populations of African Americans and few metropolitan areas. Bill Clinton carries all of the Border South states in 1992 and 1996 – West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas. He also wins Louisiana.

But since the mid-1990s there has been a massive shift in the border South regions. It’s not just on the presidential level. We’re also seeing the GOP dominate congressional districts in the Border South as well as state legislatures. And now it seems that a Democratic president has to struggle to win a primary against an unknown challenger.

Many liberals would have you believe that this is about race. This is mostly partisan claptrap. Sure, the issue of race is unavodiable in the South (just like in the big Northern cities), but there is so much more to the story. Harold Ford nearly won the Tennessee Senate seat in 2006, which was only possible because of strong backing from white voters; and if Colin Powell had been the GOP nominee in 1996 he would have done quite well there (though he probably could not have bested Clinton in his home region). Plus, the dynamics of race are quite different in a state like Mississippi (where whites barely outnumber blacks) than in Tennessee or Arkansas (where whites comprise about 80 percent of the population). Finally, for three decades many of these voters were situated quite comfortably in multi-racial voting coalitions with African Americans in the Democratic party (from roughly the passage of the Voting Rights Act to the 1994 midterm).

The real reason these people have bolted their ancestral political home has to do with the evolving shape of the Democratic party. Historically, it was a working class coalition of urban workers and rural farmers. That identity anchored the party really up through the 1960s. But then it began to develop a decidedly “New Left” ethos – turning decidedly leftward not only from cultural conservatism but also on middle class, quality of life issues (feminism, environmentalism, consumer rights, etc) that are of much more concern to “enlightened” liberals in the big cities than rural voters in Arkansas.

Think of it this way: Your average Obama voter on the Upper West Side might think the “SmartCar” is great, but a plumber working in Hot Springs would just laugh his you-know-what off if he saw a coworker drive up in one of those absurd vehicles. That’s a cultural/social/economic divide that our political parties mimic.

And so Southern whites in the Border South have found a home in the GOP. Again, not because of race but because there is a cultural and regional affinity to be found for these people in the Republican party. The GOP has long been home to rural people in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nebraska – so is not a huge surprise that, when the center of gravity in the Democratic party moved into San Francisco and Hollywood, these voters would join an alliance with people in Altoona, Pennsylvania and Aberdeen, South Dakota.

Interesting point: the center of the democrat party has moved from the rural areas to Hollywood and San Franciso, and so have its values. It has become not the party of the working class, but the party of lifestyle, who throw a bone now and then to the black underclass. It remains to be seen whether the blacks will ever wake up to how badly they are being used and abused by the elites of their own party and people like Phil Griffin at msnbc.

It is interesting to see how these things work. I went to an event for Romney but did not caucus for him the following day because my loyalties at the time were to Gingrich. However, I did take notice of who appeared to warm up the crowd (Michael Medved–the conservative radio talk show host), and a newbee I had never heard of named cathy mcmorris rogers, whom they touted as a rising star in the party. Her congressional district is in Spokane. I later learned that she is vice chair of the Policy committee which is an important job. Her cv is not all that impressive, but she is pro life, and had two children while serving in congress. She is married to a Naval Academy graduate. This is an example of what the party is putting forward to appeal to the Jacksonian demographic which is now an important part of their base, and I suspect they are positioning her to run against Patty Murray next time. She is okay I guess. But she is no Hillary Clinton. That kind of brilliance is rare in politics, and the country is the worse for lack of it. I hate the fact that party loyalty so often stands in the way of doing what is best for the country or electing the best people. Hate it.

wbboei, I’ve concluded that the Democratic party, in all its phoniness, hates the working people, regardless of their color. Hey, they’ll use them to win, but once they win, they go about sytematically destroying whatever chance a lower to middle income person has at actually making something of himself/herself. The party enacts laws that suck the life out of these groups of people. They want us enslaved to them. I never realized this until the turn of the century. As I figure things out for myself, I move further away from “them”.

McMorris Rogers appeared on Matthews, I caught the tail end of it, but it looked to me like she walked into a buzz saw. Unless you are Ari Fleisher you do not go on that show, because they set you up in advance. I watched Fleisher best Matthews and gain some insight into how it is done. The way to do it is when he starts into his diatribe disagree with everything he says, and as he gets louder you must get louder and talk over him until he runs out of steam, and then you keep talking putting him on the defensive, and his head and eyes drop to the floor like a head shot goose. That is how to do it. As somebody said once–never give a sucker an even break–even if his name is Chrissy Tingleberry Matthews.

gonzotx
May 25th, 2012 at 12:17 am
You still don’t get it TD, it shouldn’t cost taxpayers anything. It is the responsibility of the person having the child. Period. And please don’t cry me a river “what if they are 13 years old”. WTF is a 13 y/o doing having sex? The families are responsible, not the schools to set morals and expectations and not me to pay for their lifelong mistake that I hope they learn to love and cherish. The two families can raise that child. Sorry,it’s called personal responsibility and no one learns it by government handouts.
-—-—-—-—-—-
BINGO!!!!!!!!! Well said!

It’s become obvious to me that turndownobama is all about pro-big government. Government to the rescue. Me? Government to the back burner where it belongs.

nomobama
May 25th, 2012 at 12:14 pm
———————-
Yes. I first saw this in the late 1960s. I maintain,however, that natural forces would correct the problem IF only we had an honest media. I truly believe people like Phil Griffin, and his executive counterparts at NBC, CNN, ABC are the undoing of this nation. That is how serious I believe their transgressions against the truth and representative democracy are. The role of the media in a complex society is to lead the national discussion about the future of this country, and to give people the facts so they can make intelligent choices. The executives in big media have utterly forsaken the role of an honest broker for that of a bitter partisan. The only word I can think of to describe them is traitors. No other word will do.

And it gets back to that little monkey jack welch because welch who bought nbc and fired the news room whereupon begat imelt and imelt begat griffin and their mantra has always been to run big media like they would run a widget factory. Honest decent reporting does not proceed that way.

Roger Simon echoes the thesis made more than a year ago by Chris Hedges, an honest man of the left entitled Liberals are Useless. It is not so much the philosophy but the hypocrisy of its advocates that is bringing it, them and the rest of us down. But if we are to go down, let us all go down together. So long as the elites believe they can save themselves, they have no incentive to avoid the iceberg that lies ahead. The recantation and perp walk Obama forced on Corey Booker is not what one might call a buy sign on the party or our future.
———————————-
Is Liberalism Dead?

Maybe it’s just me, but I find it hard to believe liberals believe in liberalism anymore.

With the obvious global meltdown of Keynesian economics, how could anyone remotely intelligent support the continued deficit spending that is driving the Western World into bankruptcy?

And yet a large proportion of our population still backs Barack Obama for a second term. Yes, some of this is due to the reactionary identity politics the Democratic Party has practiced for so many years and some to the large number of people working for the government and therefore voting their self-interest. Even so, it’s difficult to avoid this conclusion:

AdvertisementLiberalism as an ideology is in its death throes. Only the power trip remains.

An indication of this ideological flimflam is the recent braggadocio from various MSNBC hosts that Obama is really the King of Austerity and has spent less than other presidents. Apparently, this assertion was based on the misleading figures of an economist who lumped nearly a year of Obama’s expenditures under Bush, including at least half the stimulus, but never mind. What you have is MSNBC, of all paleo-liberal outlets, bragging about their man’s lower government spending. Whatever happened to liberalism?

Similarly, and for some time, the Democratic Party is running as far as possible from the Occupy crowd and the relentless demands. Most Democratic leaders know what the majority of the public knows. The Occupyers are retreads from the Summer of Love more likely to be freeloaders or con artists, even rapists, than people with something positive to contribute to society.

Democrats — more of them, I imagine, than will publicly admit it — are recoiling from Obama’s attack on Bain Capital as well, anyone with an IQ in triple-digits knowing private equity firms have more potential to revive our economy than recycled government programs out of some five-year plan.

Democrats and liberals are confused. They have to be.

You see this ideological confusion filtering into the arts as well. Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest offering, The Dictator, with its clever parody of Islamic strongmen, not to mention dimwitted tree huggers, could have come from a neocon playbook until General Aladeen, played by Cohen, makes a final speech, referencing the “one percent” in a manner that sounded like Obama campaign boilerplate.

It felt so tacked on you knew Cohen didn’t really believe it. Two minutes later he’s back to “normal” with Aladeen ordering the murder of his new wife when he discovers she’s Jewish.

Given that their ideology is dying, no wonder liberals no longer want to debate the issues. They avoid serious discussion at every possible juncture, changing the conversation to putative racism, sexism, classism — anything but the proverbial elephant in the room, economic demise.

AdvertisementAnd yet — as I mentioned — the polls still show Obama even with Romney. How can we explain this? Why can’t they face reality?

Liberalism may not exist, but the lust for power does. And their need to cling to this power is so great they are willing to ignore reality and to forget their children, the ones who will suffer most from the economic cataclysm of their own ideology. They will literally do anything or say anything to maintain control. They will even contradict everything they stand for to survive.

But secretly – I am more than ever convinced — many of them know they are wrong. Our job is to bring them over. To make them comfortable. But we must bring them over soon before it is too late for all of us.

But the Democrats LOVE and SUPPORT women, unlike those evil Republicans!!!!!!

I’m sure the irony was completely lost on the Democrats in the crowd.

A rally was held in Milwaukee on May 19th, for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s opponent in the upcoming recall election, Milwaukee Mayor, Tom Barrett. During his speech, Barrett blasted the Republicans for their so-called “War on Women”.

Barrett then turned over the mic to rapper Prophetic (a.k.a Proph) who launched into his first number, “Sucka MCs”. The ditty contains such lyrical gems as “bitches who ride me” and “make a n***** comfortable”. If you were to ask Proph why they make him comfortable, he would respond with – “cash make the women shake they asses” so “get (on) the tour bus, bitch.”

wbboei, when I was growing up whenever my uncles, Daddy, and Grandaddy would get together they would generally talk politics. The Democratic Party today is not what it was in their day; neither is the Republican party. It was after much study and that I chose to register as an Independent voter.Today I see the two parties pre-2008 as the two wings of the same bird; neither for the ‘little’ man. And by ‘little man’ I do not mean an entitlement society of freeloaders and moochers. Watching so many choose party of over country in 2008 caused the idea that anyone would choose a party is a nonstarter for me; I use it like a measure of a person’s intelligence quotient. It tells me a lot of the person’s mindset about all things. Today I see the Democratic Party as taken over by extremists, radicals, lunatics, and thugs who want to destroy our Republic, and by extension us.

I am a daughter of Applachia. It is almost as if the two parties have reversed roles. Back then the Republican party stood for big business and the Democratic Party stood for the little man and I venture on to say that neither stood for an entitlement society for the people would have rejected that as they had too much pride; at least that is what the people in Applachia believed.Both parties changed in the 1960s in Appalachia as did the populace….that was the era of bra and draft card burning,Woodstock and the drug culture, home grown terrorists, the pill, and desegregation and after Viet Nam it was like the youth had little patriotism for the most part.

I feel the pain of those who refer to themselves as FDR Democrats…the way I see it that party ceased to exist in 2007; it is now the Dimocratic Party and is run by terrorists, unions, and thugs. The Republican party is not much better; and I will never forgive McCain for throwing the election by his failure to fight fire with fire in the 2007 campaign.To reiterate, if you still go with party, then please heed the advice of the billboard in my homestate: If you voted for the current President because of ‘party’ or to prove you are not a racist in 2008, please find someone else to vote for in 2012 to prove you are not an idiot. I will be keeping count of the idiots in 2012.

I have no problem with clear, relatively simple regulation to keep businesses honest. But over the past decade or so, what has been taking place is nothing other than a bait and switch.

==============

Thanks for a good, well-reasoned post. It reminds me of my opinion of the GOP’s situation on business.

I agree with Palin that small town small businesses are what’s really honest and productive in the nation (pace to Basil’s support of corporations as the only source of high tech research). I’m sure Palin would be an honest agent for small business in the White House as she was in Alaska (and there are probably some other honest GOP politicians too).

But mostly what happens is a sort of ‘bait and switch’. A GOP politician is elected on a ‘small busines/middle class’ platform — but somehow the GOP majorities end up enacting corporate welfare and the sort of counter-productive ‘regulation’ you describe.

Today I see the two parties pre-2008 as the two wings of the same bird; neither for the ‘little’ man.

================

That’s why I’m voting Third Party this time. Imo you’re right about the parties reversing roles — at least their public roles, their WORDS: now many Dems are appealing to various elites and most Reps are appealing to ‘little man/blue collar’.

But when we look at ACTIONS NOT WORDS, imo the GOP actions are still invariably for the rich, while the Dems more recently and still have done some ACTIONS to restrain the rich.

If you voted for the current President because of ‘party’ or to prove you are not a racist in 2008, please find someone else to vote for in 2012 to prove you are not an idiot.

Where in Florida have you seen this billboard? I may want to take a ride soon, and take a picture. I like that message. By the way, I was one of the “party” voters, but as the 2000’s came about, I found myself questioning things as I never did before. I had my reasons, but the main reason had to do with home ownership. I started paying attention to government taxation, and began to realize how harmful tax policy can be.

I’m going out, must add one thing. Many of the people now described as ‘moochers’ or ‘needing entitlements’ — WERE the employed ‘little man’, ie working man, till they fell through what Hillary in 2008 called ‘the Bush trap door’ and lost their job, 401, home, etc. And are now asking for their unemployoment benefits to be extended.

Barry was quite the accomplished marijuana enthusiast back in high school and college. Excerpts from David Maraniss’ Barack Obama: The Story dealing with the elaborate drug culture surrounding the president when he attended Punahou School in Honolulu and Occidental College in Los Angeles. He inhaled. A lot.

The billboard is in my homestate in Madison County, Alabama. We retired to Florida.

H4T and Basil99; I among others have asked for Her to be banned, but that has not happened. I have also requested that She scroll by my posts and not answer anything I post, but that has not happened either. I had given some serious thought to leaving the site; others have because of Her. She tries to pick fights….and the only result from this site is to Moderate posts. That is so not helpful; it is like a teacher punishing the whole class for the infraction of one student IOW punishing the innocent to make sure you get get the guilty party, or perhaps to redistribute the pain.

OBAMA, the lying sack of shit, says: ‘Since I’ve Been President, Federal Spending Has Risen at Lowest Pace in Nearly 60 Years’ (The Age of Fake)

TRUTH, courtesy of cns news: “Assuming the White House estimates for spending as percentage of GDP for this fiscal year and next fiscal year prove correct, federal spending during the four fiscal years that started during the Obama presidency will average 23.95 percent of GDP. After fiscal 1946 and before 2009, there was not a single fiscal year in which federal spending went that high. On average, no other post-World War II president spent money at the rate Obama is spending money.”

——-
Yup, we all know if his history wasn’t scrubbed he would never have become President. I just wonder why no one that knew him, (except Larry and his Rev. Wright) have come out of the woodwork into the light of day???

A more complete summary of Democratic Primary results is even more devastating:

* “Uncommitted” gets 40% of the Kentucky democratic primary results and challenger John Wolfe gets a comparable amount in Arkansas.
* In New Hampshire: Obama lost 20% of the primary vote; the #1 write in name was Ron Paul.
* Tuesday nights election results in West Virginia has a convicted felon getting over 40% of the vote in the DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY and garnering at least a delegate. LMAO, indeed.
* Over 20% of North Carolina DEMOCRATS selected “No Preference” as the Presidential nominee.
* Via Moe Lane: Obama loses around 20% of the vote in blue states and also up to a comparable 40% of the vote in red states (Rhode Island, 83.4%. Louisiana, 76.5%. Alabama, 80.8%. Massachusetts, 81.2%, Oklahoma, 57.1%)

“Unlike the recently re-elected presidents, Obama does not have the full support of his party.”

Perhaps one or two of you have gotten as tired as I am of the endless refrain, “Oh, but he is just SOOOOOOOO Bright!” Virtually everything that has been published about this clown is a product of the Chicago BS machine, an alarmingly secretive candidate and the slavish imagination of so many of the so called journalists who sigh when they think of Obunga.

Here is one who appears to have seen the light:

May 25, 2012
Obama Is Not That Bright
By Jack Kelly

Barack Obama is the smartest man with the highest IQ ever to be elected to the presidency, historian Michael Beschloss told radio talk show host Don Imus in November of 2008.

“So what is his IQ?” Mr. Imus asked. Mr. Beschloss didn’t know. He was just assuming.

There is little evidence to support it. Mr. Obama went to Harvard, but so did George W. Bush, who some liberals consider dumber than dirt. The president won’t release his transcripts, so we can’t judge by his grades. Mr. Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review, but when he was selected, popularity mattered more than scholarship.

Mr. Obama joined an undistinguished law firm, where he tried no cases. So no help there.

Many cite the president’s oratorical skills, but he often rambles when he speaks without a teleprompter. That’s because his brain “is moving so fast that the mouth can’t keep up,” wrote Meghan Daum of the Los Angeles Times.

Columnist Joe Klein said Mr. Obama’s first autobiography “may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.” But Mr. Obama got help writing “Dreams from My Father” from “his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers,” celebrity journalist Christopher Andersen claimed in his 2009 biography of Barack and Michelle.

Biographer David Maraniss published this month his interview with Genevieve Cook, who dated Mr. Obama in New York, but bears little resemblance to the “New York girlfriend” described in “Dreams.” That’s because she is a composite, Mr. Obama said.

Yet Mr. Obama’s description closely resembles radical Diana Oughton, who was Mr. Ayers girlfriend and who blew herself to smithereens in 1970 while building a bomb intended to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, according to the blogger “Bookworm.”

Mr. Obama has said a lot of unsmart things: there are 57 states; Canada has a president; “Austrian” is a language; America is “20 centuries” old; Arabic is spoken in Afghanistan. He’s called the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) the Maldives, and declared it would be “unprecedented” for the Supreme Court to invalidate a law passed by Congress.

President Obama’s stimulus bill didn’t stimulate. His subsidies to “green” firms have produced neither the jobs nor the energy he promised. Unemployment on his watch peaked at 10 percent, one of the highest rates since the Great Depression. Deficits are out of control.

“The man who promised everything is delivering nothing,” wrote Noemie Emery in the Weekly Standard. “Journalists who wept when he won the election now grind their teeth in despair. … The gap between sizzle and steak never seemed so large.”

Could it be that Mr. Obama’s “superior intellect” is a myth created by journalists to mask what may be the thinnest resume of anyone ever elected president? An example of puffery is the description of Mr. Obama as a former “professor of constitutional law.” Mr. Obama was a part time instructor at the University of Chicago law school, without the title or status of professor. And, according to blogger Doug Ross, he wasn’t very popular with the real professors.

“I spent some time with the highest tenured faculty member at Chicago Law a few months back,” Mr. Ross wrote in March 2010. “According to my professor friend, [Obama] had the lowest intellectual capacity in the building. … The other professors hated him because he was lazy, unqualified,”

Mr. Obama’s been governing like someone with a resume too thin for a president. He’s “incompetent,” an “amateur,” former President Bill Clinton told Hillary Clinton at a private gathering with friends, according to a new book by Ed Klein. The Clintons have vehemently denied his account.

Even Ms. Daum noticed “the gulf between the brilliant young man who wanted to change the world and the stymied president who can barely pass a piece of legislation.” Mr. Obama is just too smart to be a good president, she wrote.

Or not smart enough. “The presidency of Barack Obama is a case study in stupid does,” said Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal.

Jack Kelly is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio.

In two campaign speeches over the last two days, President Barack Obama has twice mistakenly mentioned “my sons” when defending his administration’s regulation requiring virtually all health-care plans in the United States to provide women, without any fees or co-pay, with sterilizations and all Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptives, including those that can cause abortions.

Obama, of course, has two daughters–10-year-old Sasha and 13-year-old Malia–but no sons.

On Monday, 43 Catholic dioceses and organizations across the country–including the archdioceses of New York and Washington, D.C. and the University of Notre Dame and Catholic University of America—filed 12 different lawsuits against the Obama administration arguing that because the sterilization-contraception-abortifacient mandate would force Catholics to act against the teachings of their faith it violates the First Amendment right to freedom of religion. […]

Both the transcript of the Iowa speech distributed by the White House and a video of it posted by the Des Moines Register indicated that Obama mistakenly said “my sons.”

The video of the speech posted by the Des Moines Register also shows that despite his slip about “my sons,” the president was speaking with the help of a teleprompter.

On Wednesday at the Fox Theatre in Redwood City, Calif., Obama made the same mistaken reference to “my sons.”

I watched that video; I have never heard of the host or his show. Holy Sh!t! Does Corsi have a death wish? Would it not be safer and smarter if one has explosive information to just present it and not talk about presenting it at a later date??? Brietbart should be the poster child for that. Or is he just putting Sherrif Joe Arpaio in danger?

Would that all he said would be verifiable, although we already know much of it is true. We figured it out a long time ago.

Corsi is a best-selling author and Harvard PhD who wrote the Kerry Swift Boating Book Unfit for Command and Obama Nation. His book Where’s the Birth Certificate was pulled from bookstore shelves and some think it was partially Corsi’s book which forced BO to release the so-called longformBC which, many still think, is also a forgery.

Corsi went to kenya to research his last book where he was arrested, jailed and his life, at one point, seemed to be in danger. That was as part of his research for Where’s the Birth Certificate. Like I said, the BO release of the BC coincided with the book’s release.

I don’t think Corsi gives a d@mn, refuses to be bullied and will continue his part in the vetting of the POS.

Now, Jones is a zealot as you probably gathered but truth often springs from the most unlikely places.

I thought Corsi’s predictions of the Bilderberg meeting May 31 – June 3 were very interesting. According to one writer, the BG has been deeply involved in U.S. politics including who is and is not on a ticket and who is or is not going to win.

Corsi does push the envelope but I believe HE believes what he says is the truth. We shall see.

Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from another writer about the upcoming BM.
I have no idea if it’s true but the writer confirms some of what Corsi is saying.it

Bilderberg’s decision to hold the conference in the United States is directly connected with the key role the secretive clique of industrialists, bankers, academic leaders and media figureheads will play in influencing the 2012 presidential election.

Bilderberg is set to select Mitt Romney’s running mate, with Florida Senator Marco Rubio the prime candidate to take the VP slot. Bilderberg displayed their kingmaker status during the last two U.S. presidential elections when they selected Barack Obama’s running mate Joe Biden in 2008, as well as picking John Edwards to be John Kerry’s VP in 2004.

Rubio has primed himself as a well-groomed internationalist candidate, following the likes of Hillary Clinton around to international summits including last weekend’s Summit of the Americas in Colombia.

Also, FYI, David Rockefeller THANKED the main media groups such as the NYT, LAT, WaPO, etc., for NOT divulging any of the Bilderburg plans when they were first being developed years ago.

David Rockefeller said during the 1991 Bilderberg meeting held in Baden, Germany:
“We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years.”

It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”

I cannot believe this. Also they paint Elizabeth as a Shrew, and how he could not tell Elizabeth because of the way She might React. I can’t believe this. She is not here to defend herself.

As I remember, their Son died, and they went on to have two more children together. Did she rape him, or did he not consent to the use of his sperm??? Not one but TWO children. Does that sound like they were disfunctional??

What a mess, and how terrible that the media thinks it is OK to smear a women who is not here to fight for herself.

One interesting side note. The original progressive movement was a legitimate reaction to the excesses of the Gilded Age, and found its original home in the Republican Party under the first Roosevelt–Teddy. An old lady who lived in my neigborhood knew him as a child, and he was the apple of his eye according to her. Georgia Green was her name and her father was a prominent legislator from South Dakota. Teddy fought the elites you speak of in the Republican Party, and eventually broke away to form the Bull Moose Party which ran and lost in the election of 2012. Judge Learned Hand, of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals campaigned for him in that fateful year. The mantra of the Bull Moose Party was an obscure quote from the poet Goldsmith, which could just as easily been written last year:

Ill fares the land
To hastening ills aprey
Where wealth accumulates
And men decay

The president’s supporters looking to explain Obama’s crisis among these voters [whites]have wasted no time in asserting that racism is at work. But if that is so, why was the president doing so much better in 2008 with these same voters?…..http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/05/25/obama-tries-to-stop-bleeding-with-blue-collar-voters/?test=latestnews
——————————-
Obama is wasting his time trying to appeal to the voters of Appalacia, as much as Romney is wasting his time trying to appeal to the voters of West Philadelphia. In 2008 I canvassed for Hillary throughout Appalacia–on the ground in Texas (Laredo), Pennsylvania (Kitani), Indiana (Kokomo) and West Virginia (Charleston), and I worked the phones in Kentucky and Ohio. On this point, I know whereof I speak. Never interrupt an enemy in the middle of a mistake–Bonaparte.

Would it not be safer and smarter if one has explosive information to just present it and not talk about presenting it at a later date???
————————–
No. It is much better the other way. First, you can time the release strategically–when it will do the most damage to your opponent. Second, the unexecuted threat creates fear and doubt in the mind of your opponent. Third, the power of a threat is almost always greatest before it is executed rather than after. Afterwards, its limitations become manifest, its thrust becomes known, and countermeasures are quickly adapted.

When Obama leaves office in 2013, they will play two songs for him. The first song will be Hail to the Cheat. The second, which will be played for him, Holder and the assholes who put him in there will be this:

I understand Obama is having trouble raising money. I have an idea. For the modest sum of $100 you can have your own beardo beanie (personally signed by a murderous Taliban leader), your own personal copy of Shariah Law for Dummies, and five Obama Double down of Failure bumper stickers for the back of your BMW or Ford Maverick exploding engine not included.

Get your beardo while they last. Obama, Reggie, Holder, Jarrett, Lehey and Poopsie all have theirs. Don’t miss this opportunity to show the world that you stand with the traitors. And be sure and send money.

“The current Occupy Wall Street movement is the best illustration to date of what President Barack Obama’s America looks like. It is an America where the lawless, unaccomplished, ignorant and incompetent rule. It is an America where those who have sacrificed nothing pillage and destroy the lives of those who have sacrificed greatly.

“It is an America where history is rewritten to honor dictators, murderers and thieves. It is an America where violence, racism, hatred, class warfare and murder are all promoted as acceptable means of overturning the American civil society.

“It is an America where humans have been degraded to the level of animals: defecating in public, having sex in public, devoid of basic hygiene. It is an America where the basic tenets of a civil society, including faith, family, a free press and individual rights, have been rejected. It is an America where our founding documents have been shredded and, with them, every person’s guaranteed liberties.

“It is an America where, ultimately, great suffering will come to the American people, but the rulers like Obama, Michelle Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, liberal college professors, union bosses and other loyal liberal/Communist Party members will live in opulent splendor.

“It is the America that Obama and the Democratic Party have created with the willing assistance of the American media, Hollywood , unions, universities, the Communist Party of America, the Black Panthers and numerous anti-American foreign entities.

“Barack Obama has brought more destruction upon this country in four years than any other event in the history of our nation, but it is just the beginning of what he and his comrades are capable of.

“The Occupy Wall Street movement is just another step in their plan for the annihilation of America .

“Socialism, in general, has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

H4T, I feel really bad for you that you had to pop like a cork that way towards TDO but I understand completely.

I have been reading here for years (2008) but just started posting very sporadically in the last few months. My husband, in the last few days, has been reading over my shoulder when I scroll through here and he just said to me yesterday “you do know that TDO is an Obama troll, don’t you?” I told him that I scroll through her comments because she is soooo damn annoying and irritating and she just pisses me off. I’m somewhat shy and that is why it took me so long to stop lurking and join in. The few times I have posted here on this site, I feel like TDO has attacked me, questioned me to death, cast doubts on anything I have said in my post, and has been plain condescending and rude.

I promised I wouldn’t get so involved in this election as I did in 2008 when I was crazy for Hillary and I find myself doing it again because I hate Obama so much but to come here and be dissed when I express an opinion is just masochistic on my part. I am also thinking of quitting this board and doing what I can from the sidelines to defeat Obama and not come here at all because of TDO.

Hey guys and gals, back from my whirlwind action-packed trip. I caught up on admin posts once during the trip but not been able to keep up with the comments. So Obama is in trouble and people are noticing things we wrote about in 2008 — like Althouse had this comment in one of her posts on Obama saying ‘his sons’: “He was relying on the Teleprompter, which isn’t really odd. It’s the kind of mistake you make when the words aren’t coming out of your own head.“. There was a funny spoof article (which I used in a NQ post — hilarious) in 2008 about how Obama would read everything that showed up on a screen in the WH and his aides had to make him stop doing that.

If anybody is looking for reco for their next vacay, ‘go to Zermatt’. Paris was wonderful but Zermatt was something else. Walked everywhere until my legs dropped off.

pm317: hurray for great vacations!
——-
About the news source I cite below: …In 1994 IPS changed its global organizational structure and legal status to become “a non-profit, international non-governmental organisation”, open to journalists, professional communicators and organisations active in the fields of information and communication. Starting in 2000, each regional centre was incorporated and became a separate, locally-owned legal entity, coordinating its effort and activities with the others through the IPS international association. In 2005 IPS re-established its co-operative status, with the regional centres and the IPS Columnist Service establishing the IPS International News Agency as a co-operative consortium registered in Rome, Italy….

Now to the article

The Globalisation of U.S. Special Operations Forces
By David Isenberg
snip
One does not have to look hard to find examples of U.S. SOF around the world. In Yemen, as part of the escalation of the United States’ covert war there, at least 20 U.S. special operations troops have used satellite imagery, drone video, eavesdropping systems and other technical means to help pinpoint targets for an offensive. The U.S. forces also advised Yemeni military commanders on where and when to deploy their troops President Obama said in 2010 that he had “no intention of sending U.S. boots on the ground” to Yemen. But retired Army Gen. David Petraeus, now head of the CIA, offered to secretly put U.S. special operations troops in the country, leaked State Department cables show. Then-President Saleh rebuffed his proposal. Obama later authorised a small team of special operations trainers to help Yemeni forces take on Al-Qaeda. Based mainly in the capital, those trainers were withdrawn last year but apparently began to filter back early this year. In early May the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. military leaders have developed new proposals to speed the deployment of U.S. SOF to a growing number of the world’s trouble spots. Under the new military plan, U.S. SOF would deploy either as strike groups or trainers for local armed forces. The proposal fits with a new Pentagon military strategy put in place by President Obama in January that advocates greater use of special-operations forces. The plan for special-operations forces would streamline procedures in the defence department for deploying troops, relaxing review processes and giving regional U.S. commanders greater ease of access to special-operations forces and equipment.
sniphttp://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=107906

Hadn’t heard this one before. Now I am even more supportive of Scott Walker’s efforts in Wisconsin. See supporting video in link below.

Excerpted from The Daily Caller: Sen. Ron Johnson said Thursday that every member of the state legislature in Wisconsin received an email that said “we’re going to put a bullet in your head. We know where you and your family live.”

Johnson, speaking in Washington, D.C. at America’s Future Foundation’s annual gala, said that at the height of Gov. Scott Walker’s fight against the unions, every member of the state legislature was threatened.

Take it for what this is — just a personal observation. I have traveled to India almost every year since the 1990s. The route always included a stop and a change in Europe somewhere, mostly Frankfurt or London. The planes from there to India were almost always old and dingy and we would be most often taken in a bus to the plane even in the cold of winter. It seemed like all the niceties were reserved for the Europe to/from America leg. In the trip last week, and flying back from London to DC, the plane was old and dingy and we were shlepped to the plane in a bus in Heathrow. The age of Obama.

Yes, HTA. I was impressed with my own physical fitness on this trip. We kept moving everywhere — for instance, saw Versailles, Eiffel Tower (climbed), and walked all over in Montmartre all in one day and we saw every nook and corner of everything. As I have commented here before I have been working hard on exercise and diet the last three years and saw the fruits of my labor in this trip.

yheitman
May 26th, 2012 at 3:59 am
—————–
No!!!!!! That would be bad for this blog! No matter how aggravated you become, please don’t give in to anyone who offends you here. Ignore is best. We need all the help we can get from anyone who can provide whatever information that they find about Obama. I understand why you feel the way that you do, believe me, but our goal is so important. Who know who might stumble on to this sight and read something that you may have posted that geys him or her to vote against the “once” come November. Turndownobama plays the contrarion on this blog. I almost always disagree with what she writes, but one has to admit that she is telling all of us exactly how the extreme left views things, and we need to understand that side too (in order to think of ways to combat those viewpoints), regardless of if we agree or not.

Thanks, HTA. Funny thing was the gate guy looking at my passport pic with full cheeks and me now, took a second look, :). I told him I had lost weight and he congratulated me. I am just a couple of pounds shy of my ideal weight. I had always been proud of keeping up my appearance but the work stress and life in general the last few years made it difficult. But now I am back on track.

If she would have bothered to view the Corsi interview she would have seen that he clearly said all the new info was also in the hands of several others who would make sure it saw the light of day in case anything happened to him.

Now that is incontrovertible proof that she is either spouting talking points, trying to insult, demean and slander other bloggers or is just an ingonorant annoying bot.

I don’t get it. Why can’t they just leave us alone and let us all take what vitamins we want to take?
———————————————
Because where Dick Durbin is from Illinois, and in Illinois the Combine holds sway, and under the rules of the Combine contributors count, constituents do not, and the drug companies are contributors to Durbin. The alternative explanation is that Durbin is as dedicated to saving the nation from vitamin hucksters as MO is to saving from obesity–which is why she hates Oprah. If it were Obama, then the latter explanation would be the one big media would promulgate, but when it is Durbin, because his is a dimkocrat, they just cover for him, by burying the story. With big media, the dims and Obama, to the extent there is really any difference we don’t count. The kind of power the idiots of the electorate have given them brooks no dissent and no boundaries.

Interesting developments. Another difference between dims and rethugs. According to my sources, Obama is poised to give full faith and credit to Sharia law in United States Courts in cases involving Muslim Americans, whereas Romney, for obvious reasons would not.

This is an issue Obama will avoid until after the election, and big media will avoid it too in order to protect him. Obviously, this is not entirely his decision, but the way to do it, I suppose, would be through a treaty of some sort. The manner of execution is unclear to me at least, but with mainstream media full speed behind him, not because he is right, but because he is and will always be infallible in their eyes, the chances for success here are actually quite high assuming he is re-elected. The other thing, I suppose, is he will control the supreme court and sure as night follows day, his appointees will rubber stamp whatever he does. This decision on Obama care will show that statement to be true.

Kansas gov. signs measure blocking Islamic law
Published May 26, 2012

Associated Press

This undated photo shows Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback at a press conference. (AP)
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback has signed a law aimed at keeping the state’s courts or government agencies from basing decisions on Islamic or other foreign legal codes, and a national Muslim group’s spokesman said Friday that a court challenge is likely.

The new law, taking effect July 1, doesn’t specifically mention Shariah law, which broadly refers to codes within the Islamic legal system. Instead, it says courts, administrative agencies or state tribunals can’t base rulings on any foreign law or legal system that would not grant the parties the same rights guaranteed by state and U.S. constitutions.

“This bill should provide protection for Kansas citizens from the application of foreign laws,” said Stephen Gele, spokesman for the American Public Policy Alliance, a Michigan group promoting model legislation similar to the new Kansas law. “The bill does not read, in any way, to be discriminatory against any religion.”

But supporters have worried specifically about Shariah law being applied in Kansas court cases, and the alliance says on its website that it wants to protect Americans’ freedoms from “infiltration” by foreign laws and legal doctrines, “especially Islamic Shariah Law.”

Brownback’s office notified the state Senate of his decision Friday, but he actually signed the measure Monday. The governor’s spokeswoman, Sherriene Jones-Sontag, said in a statement that the bill “makes it clear that Kansas courts will rely exclusively on the laws of our state and our nation when deciding cases and will not consider the laws of foreign jurisdictions.”

Muslim groups had urged Brownback to veto the measure, arguing that it promotes discrimination. Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, said a court challenge is likely because supporters of the measure frequently expressed concern about Shariah law.

Hooper said of Brownback, “If he claims it has nothing to do with Shariah or Islamic law or Muslims, then he wasn’t paying attention.”

Both the Washington-based council and the National Conference of State Legislatures say such proposals have been considered in 20 states, including Kansas. Gele said laws similar to Kansas’ new statute have been enacted in Arizona, Louisiana and Tennessee.

Oklahoma voters approved a ballot initiative in 2010 that specifically mentioned Shariah law, but both a federal judge and a federal appeals court blocked it.

There are no known cases in which a Kansas judge has based a ruling on Islamic law. However, supporters of the bill have cited a pending case in Sedgwick County in which a man seeking to divorce his wife has asked for property to be divided under a marriage contract in line with Shariah law.

Supporters argue the measure simply ensures that legal decisions will protect long-cherished liberties, such as freedom of speech and religion and the right to equal treatment under the law. Gele said the measure would come into play if someone wanted to enforce a libel judgment against an American from a foreign nation without the same free speech protections.

“It is perfectly constitutional,” he said.

The House approved the bill unanimously and the Senate, with broad, bipartisan support. Even some legislators who were skeptical of it believed it was broad and bland enough that it didn’t represent a specific political attack on Muslims.

“This disturbing recent trend of activist judges relying upon the laws of other nations has been rejected by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in both the Kansas House and Senate,” Jones-Sontag said.

The measure’s chief sponsor, Rep. Peggy Mast, an Emporia Republican, also has said all Kansans, including Muslims, should be comfortable with the new law, but she did not immediately respond Friday to telephone and email messages seeking comment.

Rep. Scott Schwab, an Olathe Republican, acknowledged that the measure merely “made some people happy” and that a vote against it could be cast politically as a vote in favor of Shariah law.

“Am I really concerned that Shariah law is going to take over the Kansas courts? No,” he said. “I’m more concerned about getting jobs to Kansas.”

The Michigan-based alliance advocates model “American Law for American Courts” legislation. Its website says, “America has unique values of liberty which do not exist in foreign legal systems, particularly Shariah Law.”

During the Kansas Senate’s debate on the bill earlier this month, Sen. Susan Wagle, a Wichita Republican described a vote for the measure as a vote for women’s rights, adding, “They stone women to death in countries that have Shariah law.”

Hooper said supporters of such proposals have made it clear they are targeting Islamic law.

“Underlying all of this is demonizing Islam and marginalizing American Muslims,” he said.

The stream of lies that emanates from AP is absolutely ENDLESS. Everything you get from them is pro Obama propaganda. The only question is whether it is subtle or overt. Today, chapter 5041 we find a headline that gas prices are falling, Americans are hitting the road for the holiday and the economy is improving. Deceitful liars. Nothing about the real unemployment rates, the number of people on public assistance, the crisis in Europe, the soaring debt, just this happy horseshit refrain of happy days are here again. The head of AP recently talked about how great Obama is. What does that tell you. This liar is a key player in The Age of Fake, and this perverse organization was stalking Hillary in 2008. Beth Fouhey was her name. She is gone now but other Obama blow jobs have risen in their ranks to take her place.

Same slant from our local stations. Someone has done an analysis of what O has been able to achieve of the things he promised. 34% and most of it in the timeperiod when he had a majority, 14% not achieve or he has gone back on completely.

I guess I have problems understanding these numbers. Part of it is the difficulty of the items he has so called achieved. They admit that the major one, so call Obama Care, if turned off by the Supreme Court will hurt him. There were some major non achieved ones, and a few downright opposite of what he promised.

Even if you accept these number, a approximately 33% achievement rate, and I think they were mostly of mondain items, in my book is not passing. Of course they want to emphasize that most of what was achieve was when he had a majority.

Did someone not tell him that you have to achieve whether you have a majority or not. Plenty of President’s have.

Remember the discussion of Buchanan? Well I looked him up on the Internet. I found the discussion interesting. He was engaged once, but she cut off the engagement because of some attentions he payed to another women Shortly afterwards, she died. Her father blamed him, and he was not invited to the funeral. They claimed that he said he could love no one else after that (one true love or guilt I am not sure which). There was discussion of his sexual orientation, which I found interesting. There was a life long male that lived in his home. However, the people writting up the bio said there was no conclusive evidence. Evidently the nieces of both men burned there letters when they died. There was some discussion of his having low sex drive, and also some features that they felt hightlighted his sexuality, or lack there of. The main one was the fact that he did not have to shave.

I am not interested in starting a discussion of this, but I found some of those items to be interesting. He was the President right before the Civil War, one term, and the nation was horrible divided. He was followed by Lincoln and the out break of the civil war.

I’ll confirm that prObama is working overtime these days.It’s everywhere and it is bad. WPIX’s (NYC)Lionel/Jodi used to provide great opinion, as at the beginning of the Trayvon saga. I’ve noticed them ratcheting back anyway. But last week Jodi intro’d the mea culpa video of Corey Booker by saying that the WH had called. Now BO is watching and their opinion pieces are really garbage. It had been such a great place, and I’d thought it to be totally independent. Have since found out otherwise. Jodi referred to WNEP (Moosic AKA Scranton) as a sister station. I tweeted a query to WNEP and one of the anchors informed me that they have separate owners who, on occasion, “cooperate.” Thus sisterhood of a degree.

I guess I’m going to watch “George Washington’s First War” now. Have to remind myself what he went through for our Republic. Then hopefully rejuvenated, I can carry on.

…like I said…I won’t be surprised…guess others are thinking the same thing…..
imho…he is auditioning to be the next Michael Steele suck up on MSNBC…will fit right in with the other traitor, Joe S…all on msnbc

Newt Gingrich will “debate” Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday, his second big appearance on an NBC political show in less than a week. Last night on MSNBC’s Hardball, Gingrich joked with Chris Matthews about history, politics, and how a black mamba attacks during his first major appearance on the network. If we have learned anything about Newt Gingrich, it is he is always up to something. So, what is Newt up to? We think he’s trying to get a new TV job.

How do we know Newt’s hustling for a talking head gig? Let us present the facts:

One, Newt needs a job. Gingrich has a well-documented taste for expensive things, but his presidential campaign caused parts of his large moneymaking organization to go bankrupt. Newt needs money.

Two, Gingrich has demonstrated that he likes making money by talking on TV. His entire career has been one long march in that direction. As congressman, he figured out he could making thrilling TV out of C-SPAN. He was a frequent Sunday news show guest, and was a paid contributor for Fox News before he started running for president.

Three, Gingrich burned his Fox News bridge so bad. In April, he complained the conservative network was biased against him. “I think Fox has been for Romney all the way through,” Gingrich said. “I assume it’s because Murdoch at some point said, ‘I want Romney’, and so ‘fair and balanced’ became ‘Romney’. And there’s no question that Fox had a lot to do with stopping my campaign because such a high percentage of our base watches Fox.” Fox News chief Roger Ailes scoffed Gingrich was just “trying to get a job at CNN because he knows he isn’t going to get to come back to Fox News.”

Four, Gingrich made a play for a CNN job, and appears to have failed. After he used a question from debate moderator John King to rail against the liberal media in January, Newt tried to make nice. King “did a great job,” Gingrich said. In April, he sucked up to CNN a little more. “In our experience, Callista and I both believe CNN is less biased than Fox this year… We are more likely to get neutral coverage out of CNN than we are of Fox, and we’re more likely to get distortion out of Fox. That’s just a fact.” Fox sent out a press release saying, “This is nothing other than Newt auditioning for a windfall of a gig at CNN – that’s the kind of man he is.”

Five, NBC is the last network left. Gingrich has been trying to get that news network to like him, too. He was a guest at MSNBC’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner after-party in late April. And he’s letting himself get slapped around a little bit by the liberal Chris Matthews. His job Sunday will be to represent conservative talking points against a Democratic governor.

“I’m not going to worry about Newt Gingrich,” The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes said last month. “He’s going to find his way. He always has.” If Gingrich performs well this weekend, perhaps it will be the start of another Newt comeback. His third—or twelfth—depending on how you count it.

Didn’t this turn out to be a hoax or a kid’s prank or something? “Every member” would mean everyone on both sides.

===============

Excerpted from The Daily Caller: Sen. Ron Johnson said Thursday that every member of the state legislature in Wisconsin received an email that said “we’re going to put a bullet in your head. We know where you and your family live.”

A new book on Barack Obama reveals fresh details about the president’s youthful days as an avid smoker of marijuana — a time when he and his fellow weed smokers called themselves the “Choom Gang.”

Among the highlights:

— Obama was known for his interceptions. This is the act of joining a circle of people passing around a joint, taking a hit and yelling, “Intercepted!”

— Obama and his friends at the Punahou School in Hawaii called themselves the “Choom Gang” — choom means smoking weed — and drove around in a Volkswagen bus called the “Choomwagon.”

— Obama and his crew enjoyed what they called “roof hits,” smoking pot inside a car with all the windows rolled up to maximize the amount of smoke they inhaled.

Why did Obama put his dog on the roof of the car? So it wouldn’t get stoned.

Speaking only for myself, I’m fine with having a president who used to get blazed out of his mind. It’s just funny that the same people who are scrambling to defend him were, shall we say, somewhat less accepting of Bush’s youthful indiscretions.

And as Mike Riggs at Reason points out: “Barack Obama Punishes People for Getting High; It Used to Be, He Punished Them for Not Getting High Enough.”

btw…the whole Obama health scam is devised to deliver the pay off to the drug companies and keep us enslaved to them by mandate…

it is a no brainer why they are trying to ice out the alternative health industry…it is one thing to go after fake enhancements for dieting and sports…but it is quite another to go after alternative and holistic medicine…especially for people who have no desire to use many corporate/traditional medicinal practices…I have a friend who is an MIT educated chemist and he also has been fighting this fight for many, many years…

…it is mostly about money and the drug companies lock on the market and pushing out any competition for other ways of healing…

Truebearing says:
It appears Obama was into parasitism way back in high school, proudly mooching other people’s reefer like he was entitled to it. Remember folks, “Choom” is just “mooch” spelled backwards.

Andrew X says:
Like so many, I went through that tunnel and emerged out the other end, weed doing me NO favors at all, so it’s hard for me to get all too morally ginned up about it.

But what is totally classic here, and I am shocked no one has mentioned it, is that “intercepted” thing. Haven’t a number of poeple said that that is exactly what Obama does legislatively and politically? I mean right down the line: Hang out in the background, or better yet on the golf course, let others do the grunt work, and then when the work is done, swoop and …. INTERCEPTED!… glom onto the credit for his own wonderfulness in accomplishing the task. Even the bin Laden “me me I me I and me” speech. INTERCEPTED!

ShortTermer
May 25th, 2012 at 6:28 pm
Does Corsi have a death wish? Would it not be safer and smarter if one has explosive information to just present it and not talk about presenting it at a later date???

TDO:
Exactly! Or at least to add, “And killing me won’t conceal it, because I’ve put copies in a safe place for others to open, etc etc.”

—————–

BASIL99
May 26th, 2012 at 9:31 am
[Corsi] clearly said all the new info was also in the hands of several others who would make sure it saw the light of day in case anything happened to him.

=====================

I seldom read Corsi; like Ulsterman, he’s too far out for me. Did Corsi really call Hillary a ‘fat hog’, and say this about her?

Althouse had this comment in one of her posts on Obama saying ‘his sons’: “He was relying on the Teleprompter, which isn’t really odd. It’s the kind of mistake you make when the words aren’t coming out of your own head.“.

=================

I’m too lazy to look up the Althouse post. Did the teleprompter text have ‘sons’?

So Obama is in trouble and people are noticing things we wrote about in 2008 — like Althouse had this comment in one of her posts on Obama saying ‘his sons’: “He was relying on the Teleprompter, which isn’t really odd. It’s the kind of mistake you make when the words aren’t coming out of your own head.“.

The Obama Administration, i.e. Obama Jarrett and Brennan have given access to the most sensitive information we have on terrorism, which bears directly on our capabilities and tactics, to Hollywood film makers who have no security clearance. The mecca of the dimocrat party now is not the United States, but Hollywood and San Francisco, as Jay Cost opined yesterday. This is from Judicial Watch which managed to extract some very damaging email information from the Administration on this subject under the FIA.
——————-

As Congressional Quarterly put it, “Try as both candidates really might, this presidential election will never be exclusively about economic growth and job creation. Not so long as outside groups retain their ever-more-outsized role in framing the debate. And one of the masters of the form, the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, is out with another shape-shifter – which Republicans pounced on today as buttressing their passionately held view that Obama is more suited to being celebrity in chief than commander in chief.”
———————–
(From King’s letter)

Filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal may have set out to tell a blockbuster, election-year story about one of the most highly classified operations in American history, but through these emails they’ve ended up telling a damning story of extremely close, unprecedented, and potentially dangerous collaboration with top officials at the CIA, DoD, and the White House and a top Democratic lobbying firm.”

“After reviewing these emails, I am even more concerned about the possible exposure of classified information to these filmmakers, who as far as I know, do not possess security clearances. The email messages indicate that the filmmakers were allowed an unprecedented visit to a classified facility so secret that its name is redacted in the released email. If this facility is so secret that the name cannot even be seen by the public, then why in the world would the Obama Administration allow filmmakers to tour it? The emails also tell of these filmmakers being allowed to tour the CIA’s vaults, which is absolutely shocking to those of us who know the sensitive nature of materials kept there.

“Also troubling is the fact that the Democratic lobbying firm Glover Park Group was so intimately involved in brokering these filmmakers’ access to clandestine officers and potentially special operators only weeks after the mission and when details were otherwise still very closely guarded, and one of Glover Park’s primary contacts within the Administration, CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf, left shortly thereafter to join President Obama’s reelection campaign in Chicago.

“This is a very serious issue. We simply cannot forget what then-Secretary of Defense Bob Gates said a week after the raid: ‘Frankly, a week ago Sunday, in the Situation Room, we all agreed that we would not release any operational details from the effort to take out bin Laden. That all fell apart on Monday, the next day

• Agency insists it only looks for evidence of genuine threats to the U.S. and not for signs of general dissent

Revealing: A list of keywords used by government analysts to scour the internet for evidence of threats to the U.S. has been released under the Freedom of Information Act
The Department of Homeland Security has been forced to release a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S.

The intriguing the list includes obvious choices such as ‘attack’, ‘Al Qaeda’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘dirty bomb’ alongside dozens of seemingly innocent words like ‘pork’, ‘cloud’, ‘team’ and ‘Mexico’.

Released under a freedom of information request, the information sheds new light on how government analysts are instructed to patrol the internet searching for domestic and external threats.

The words are included in the department’s 2011 ‘Analyst’s Desktop Binder’ used by workers at their National Operations Center which instructs workers to identify ‘media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities’.

“This is a very serious issue. We simply cannot forget what then-Secretary of Defense Bob Gates said a week after the raid: ‘Frankly, a week ago Sunday, in the Situation Room, we all agreed that we would not release any operational details from the effort to take out bin Laden. That all fell apart on Monday, the next day

Tom Fitton
———–
You know if things are so damning, I wish people like Bob Gates would not sit on their hands.

Same slant from our local stations. Someone has done an analysis of what O has been able to achieve of the things he promised. 34% and most of it in the timeperiod when he had a majority, 14% not achieve or he has gone back on completely.
———————–
NMF–I am assuming that when the time comes the 527s will unleash a withering attack on Obama, and people who promote these misleading characterizations of his record will run into the air raid shelter for cover. They are telling their lies too early, and they are not sticking. It isn’t the percentage of promises which he has not kept–that kind of calculating is the stuff of trivial minds. It is the substance. The thing that drove me nuts during the primary was the media’s lack of proportionality. In their mind a hang nail is the practical equivalent of terminal cancer since both are health related issues, and such a comparison is helpful to Obama in fending off a legitimate attack.

The words are included in the department’s 2011 ‘Analyst’s Desktop Binder’ used by workers at their National Operations Center which instructs workers to identify ‘media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities’.
———————
This is what Dana Milbank and his fellow jurnolisters are promoting, without realizing it. Useful idiots who stand idly by while our constitution is destroyed. Liberals? They say they are. But you know what? There is noting liberal about them. Nothing. Just useful idiots clinging desperately to their privileged lifestyle and lying through their teeth to protect it. How many times have I thought about the wisdom of Chris Hedges–an honest man of the left and his seminal work: Liberals are Useless. And now Roger Simon’s piece on the same subject, posted above. Liberalism is important to our freedom. What we see now is totalitarianism disguised as liberalism, and our mainstream media elites are the shock troops.

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below. She shouted to him,

“Excuse me sir , can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, “You’re in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.

She rolled her eyes and said, “You must be a Republican.

“I am,” smiled the man. “How did you know?”

“Well,” answered the lady balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct. But I have no idea what to do with your information, and I’m still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help to me.”

The man smiled and responded, “You must be an Obama-Democrat.”

“I am,” proudly replied the balloonist. “How did you know?”

“Well,” said the man, “you don’t know where you are — or where you are going. You have risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem.

You’re in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, now it’s my fault

Yesterday, we were having a discussion about where were you when the lights went on–meaning when and where did you wake up to the fact that liberalism was turning into totalitarianism. I grew up in the 1950s and government had recently succeeded in two of its grandest projects–winning world war II and moving into the post war era of prosperity after the great depression. Government was credited for that and all boats rose with the tide. In those day our state had two estimable senators–Warren Magnuson–Dean of the Senate who appointed me to Annapolis, and Scoop Jackson who ran for President. Today we have Patty Murray who won the contest put by senate pages to name the dumbest person in the senate, and yet she is on the short list for vice president, and Maria Cantwell who is better, but the rap on her from the lobbyists is if you have a meeting with her and a point to make, do it in the first 15 minutes because after that she is lost in space. What changed between the era of Magnuson/Jackson and today. Well, the country changed, but so did the parties. And the new left took over the democratic party, and now the country. And what we feared most about them has proven to be true. They cannot run the country, the most they can do is destroy it. If you did not have the chance to read Tom Sowells diagnosis of what that means I received it by email and posted it here last night I strongly encourage you to do so. I guess 2012 will prove the age old point that a democracy gets the kind of government it deserves/

The other interesting thing that Jay Cost pointed out in his article was that in the past, the elites of the democratic party believed that in order to win elections, they must serve the interests of the middle class, and both parties were committed to that objective. Today, the dimocrats simply serve their contributors–and the attack by durbin on the vitamin supplement industry is one of ten thousand examples. There is nothing left in their snatch and grab approach to governance that reaches, much less serves the public interest broadly construed. On the contrary, as they feed the mouths of their contributors they turn to us and say we must have tax increases so we can feed our contributors and everyone will live happily ever after–what is a 16 trillion dollar deficit among friends.

“There is nothing I take more serious than my responsibility to those who have risked their own safety to defend ours.”
——————
meaningless tripe. People need to understand that he is a pathological liar, therefore what he says–whatever he says, it more than likely yet another lie. Nothing he says and nothing he promises can be believed.

Nomobama – This part of your post said it best: “we need to understand that side too (in order to think of ways to combat those viewpoints), regardless of if we agree or not”

You’re right. I’ll just scroll on by and ignore and not try to take her comments to heart-but it is hard. When she does things like that I feel, well there’s no other word for it, but rejected and it feels like what I say is not worthwhile.

I am half Mexican and it brings back bad memories of when I was a kid in school and I was discriminated against. I grew up in a very good neighborhood and my parents did very well for themselves. I was one of maybe 2-3 minorities throughout my school years and that was in San Diego in the early 60s! In middle school, which had a more than a thousand students, I think there one or maybe two blacks and it stayed that way throughout high school. I was as light-skinned as they were but with the Spanish surname I was the “wetback.” So needless to say, I was a high achiever who kept her head down and didn’t make waves but really had no friends in school. That’s how TDO makes me feel all over again. I know it’s stupid but a little girl psyche was damaged by ignorant kids.

Yes, it’s illegitimate and imo evil. But we may need to be more careful in terminology. There’s something going around (and perhaps at Snopes or such place) pooh poohing the concern and saying “No,dummies, no one is attacking your vitamins and minerals.” Very far down it admits an attack exists and is against herbs and supplements that are not pure vitamins/minerals.

So to make that clear maybe we should avoid the terms ‘vitamins’ and ‘minerals’.

I’ve been ruminating in the NYDailyNews articles of 4 years ago. Came across this and I do perhaps feel a little of what it’s like to be ABM90 posting about our girl who even at the torrid time being reported upon, was concerned for the party unity:
Barack Obama not tough enough on wild rev., says Hillary Clinton team
BY DAILY NEWS STAFF
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Barack Obama is blowing his chance to unite the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton’s camp charged Friday. Team Clinton said the party is being splintered by Obama’s failure to forcefully condemn one of his spiritual advisers for mocking the former First Lady from the pulpit. “When Sen. Clinton supporters see those comments, they are understandably angered by them,” said Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s communications director. “And it’s important, I think, for the spirit of unity that we’re all trying to create, for Sen. Obama and his campaign to condemn them specifically,” he added. On Sunday, during an appearance at Obama’s Trinity United Church of Christ, the Rev. Michael Pfleger accused Clinton of believing she’s entitled to the presidency because of her skin color. “‘I’m white. I’m entitled. There’s a black man stealing my show,'” Pfleger mocked. Wolfson called Pfleger’s remarks “divisive,” “hateful,” “reprehensible” and “counterproductive” to healing a Democratic Party deeply divided between Obama and Clinton. Obama issued a statement Thursday deeming Pfleger’s comments “divisive” and “backward-looking.” Pfleger apologized. But Wolfson insisted Obama’s statement wasn’t sufficient. “We remain disappointed that Sen. Obama didn’t specifically reject Father Pfleger’s despicable comments about Sen. Clinton.
“Obama aides declined to comment Friday.In a statement, Francis Cardinal George of the Archdiocese of Chicago called Pfleger’s remarks “partisan” and a “personal attack” on Clinton. George said Pfleger will refrain from political campaigning and will no longer publicly mention any candidate by name. Obama once credited Pfleger for helping the candidate keep his moral compass.msaul@nydailynews.comhttp://articles.nydailynews.com/2008-05-31/news/17898850_1_obama-aides-obama-and-clinton-despicable-comments

Father Pfleger
—————
This guy belongs in Dante’s Inferno, one rung below child molesters. I hope he rots in hell for all eternity. He is a disgrace to the Catholic religion, and everything that is decent, civilized and worth preserving. I think he is the re-incarnation of Satan posing as a priest.

More of WJC helping those who backed HRC. This one is especially sweet cuz Axlegrease has already been there to appear with Pacrell’s opponent
Friday May 25 2012
Former President Bill Clinton will be stumping for Rep. Bill Pascrell just days before NJ voters cast their ballots in the heated primary battle in the 9th congressional district. Clinton will swoop into the Bergen County battleground next Friday, June 1, a Pascrell campaign official said. The high-profile appearance comes after Pascrell’s Democratic opponent, Rep. Steve Rothman, campaigned with President Obama’s top political adviser, David Axelrod, this week.
Pascrell and Rothman were put on a collision course last year when New Jersey lost a seat in Congress after redistricting.Campaign officials confirmed the visit but could not provide more detailshttp://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/05/bill_clinton_to_stump_for_pasc.html

The other piece of the story is that Rothman backed Obama over Hillary in the 2008 presidential primary

And, as my brother who has a 13 going on 30 year old teen told me what my sister, who has a 25 year old college drop-out trying to drop back in whose tuition she refuses to pay for, said when he asked her for advice about raising teens, tweens and 20-somethngs:

“Just useful idiots clinging desperately to their privileged lifestyle and lying through their teeth to protect it.’

That’s one of the things Corsi said in his long skype interview; if the aglobalists get their way the “useful idiots” will be the first to go and that means all current media personnel including (especially) the pro-bot crew.

They are digging their own grave, one way or the other. If BO loses, they’re history. If Bo wins, they’re history because the resultant necessary cover-ups will be far too complex for their teeny pinhead brains to comprehend and either a new group of useful idiots will be recruited or the American public – knowing full well they will have been royally scammed if BO weasels his way into a 2nd term – will tune them all out.

To have an incumbent launching character attacks on his opponent so early and so often is unusual. To have Obama delivering such attacks in person and by name across the country in the last week of May is something we’ve not seen in modern American politics.

So what’s the point of all that ugliness for an incumbent president? Why take the chance?

Part of it is Obama’s belief that he must cripple Romney now. If the president can succeed in rendering Romney a toxic asset in the spring, Obama can spend the summer and fall trying to restore some luster to his halo. Also, Democrats believe that they would win a base-versus-base election and wouldn’t mind if independent voters just got so grossed out that they stayed home on Nov. 6.

and I am stealing it too it is priceless. 🙂
BASIL99
May 26th, 2012 at 2:42 pm

Had to steal this from another blogger.

RMinNC | May 26, 2012 at 11:11 am |

JOKE OF THE DAY:

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below. She shouted to him,

“Excuse me sir , can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, “You’re in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.

She rolled her eyes and said, “You must be a Republican.

“I am,” smiled the man. “How did you know?”

“Well,” answered the lady balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct. But I have no idea what to do with your information, and I’m still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help to me.”

The man smiled and responded, “You must be an Obama-Democrat.”

“I am,” proudly replied the balloonist. “How did you know?”

“Well,” said the man, “you don’t know where you are — or where you are going. You have risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem.

You’re in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, now it’s my fault

Part of it is Obama’s belief that he must cripple Romney now. If the president can succeed in rendering Romney a toxic asset in the spring, Obama can spend the summer and fall trying to restore some luster to his halo. Also, Democrats believe that they would win a base-versus-base election and wouldn’t mind if independent voters just got so grossed out that they stayed home on Nov. 6.
—————————–
This is a dysfunctional strategy. If you are going to render Romney a toxic asset the time to try to do that is a week before the elections, as opposed to six months early. You cannot do that six months early, and expect that to hold when you are taking on taking on water in the months leading up to the election. This is more likely an indication that the walls are closing in on Obama, and his base no longer believes in him. They know he has not delivered, and four more years of his bon vivante presence will do nothing to change that. The further problem is he will build sympathy for Romney. The final point is he is all engrossed in that Texiara theorum that the voting blocks are static whereas the demographic he had in 2008 is not the one he had in 2010 and certainly not now.

This is getting freaky. Over just the past few days there have been major (but under-reported) stories about all sorts of gov’t intervention. Here are a few.

1 – On July 1 the new Australian Carbon Tax goes into effect and it forbids biusiness owners from speaking critically about it or face large fines up to $1 million.

“Praised by Barack Obama as a model for the world, Australia’s highly unpopular carbon tax, set to take effect from July 1st, is set to be policed by laws which forbid business owners from criticizing it for causing price rises – with thought criminals who do so under threat of being hit with huge fines of over $1 million dollars.
“SHOPS and restaurants could face fines up to $1.1 million if waiters or sales staff wrongly blame the carbon tax for price rises or exaggerate the impact,” reports the Daily Telegraph.

According to ACCC deputy chairman Dr Michael Schaper, the warning applies, “to comments made by staff over the phone, on the shop floor or in meetings. It also covers advertising, product labels, websites, invoices, contracts and contract negotiations.”
This draconian measure will be enforced by teams of “carbon cops” who roam the streets conducting snap inspections of businesses to ensure they are not making any reference to the tax.

3 – A Texas University is requiring all students to have microchipped ID’s so they can know where they are at all times.

“Northside Independent School District plans to track students next year on two of its campuses using technology implanted in their student identification cards in a trial that could eventually include all 112 of its schools and all of its nearly 100,000 students.”

The European Union is now moving to create a mandatory electronic ID system for all EU citizens that would be implemented across Europe to standardize business both online and in person, authenticating users via a common ‘electronic signature.’ A single authenticating ID would guard access to the Internet, online data and most commerce.”

As we were driving around in Geneva, we noticed the beautiful transportation system, almost every minute a tram going back and forth between one end of the city to the downtown and somewhere beyond with less than 10% occupancy (on a weekend).. just one example of what a city can provide taking your money assuming they do it efficiently. There is not always economies of scale and efficiency. You give your money to the state whether you use the services or not. It occurred to us that the state saps you out of any discretionary money you have so you are forced into a resource poor state that you depend more and more on the services they provide. It is a catch 22. Long story short, I and my husband concluded that we like the American system better.

My comments with links (as requested y some here) are not going through so I will just point out two recent alarming incidents.

1 – Every member of the Wisconsin Legislature received death threats during the union battles last fall.

2 – There is growing evidence the Supreme Court is being threatened. Case in point – Breyer has been robbed twice in the past few weeks.

Senator Leahy has browbeaten the court in recent days.

‘Sen. Patrick Leahy took to the floor of the Senate last week to try and intimidate Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts into deferring to congressional authority and upholding Obamacare on the basis that it is constitutional via the Commerce Clause. Leahy even mentions how he voted for Roberts during his confirmation because Roberts gave assurances that he would respect congressional authority, and Leahy says this case would be a ‘fundamental test’ as to whether Roberts will be true to his testimony.”

Sen. Patrick Leahy took to the floor of the Senate last week to try and intimidate Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts into deferring to congressional authority and upholding Obamacare on the basis that it is constitutional via the Commerce Clause. Leahy even mentions how he voted for Roberts during his confirmation because Roberts gave assurances that he would respect congressional authority, and Leahy says this case would be a ‘fundamental test’ as to whether Roberts will be true to his testimony.”
————————
Leahy is famous for this stuff. Years ago he attacked Cheney on the floor of the Senate, then cornered him in the Senate cloak room and tried to apologize and make light of it. Cheney told him to fuck off, and left him standing there in the cloak room like a frozen fresco. Nobody in the upper echelon of government takes this turkey buzzard seriously. One day he went to work with a world’s oldest Dead Head shirt on. Any day he dressed otherwise he is out of uniform. He was once arrested for impersonating a human being.

So if congress passes an unconstitutional law, then the court must uphold it in order to respect “congressional authority”? What kind of a lawyer was Leahy before he became the laughing stock of the Senate?

This is getting freaky. Over just the past few days there have been major (but under-reported) stories about all sorts of gov’t intervention. Here are a few.

(Sans links coz spam monster won’t let them through).

1 – On July 1 the new Australian Carbon Tax goes into effect and it forbids business owners from speaking critically about it or face large fines up to $1 million.

“Praised by Barack Obama as a model for the world, Australia’s highly unpopular carbon tax, set to take effect from July 1st, is set to be policed by laws which forbid business owners from criticizing it for causing price rises – with thought criminals who do so under threat of being hit with huge fines of over $1 million dollars.

“SHOPS and restaurants could face fines up to $1.1 million if waiters or sales staff wrongly blame the carbon tax for price rises or exaggerate the impact,” reports the Daily Telegraph.

According to ACCC deputy chairman Dr Michael Schaper, the warning applies, “to comments made by staff over the phone, on the shop floor or in meetings. It also covers advertising, product labels, websites, invoices, contracts and contract negotiations.”
This draconian measure will be enforced by teams of “carbon cops” who roam the streets conducting snap inspections of businesses to ensure they are not making any reference to the tax.

2 – A British writer recommends implanting all newborns with ID chips. (I wrote a story about that 2 decades ago. Then it was SF).

3 – A Texas University is requiring all students to have microchipped ID’s so they can know where they are at all times.

“Northside Independent School District plans to track students next year on two of its campuses using technology implanted in their student identification cards in a trial that could eventually include all 112 of its schools and all of its nearly 100,000 students.”

4 – EU Demands ID Chip for all European Citizens

The European Union is now moving to create a mandatory electronic ID system for all EU citizens that would be implemented across Europe to standardize business both online and in person, authenticating users via a common ‘electronic signature.’ A single authenticating ID would guard access to the Internet, online data and most commerce.”

h t t p : / / en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Wisconsin_protests
On May 12, 100 pages of public records were released that detailed the emotions and threats that occurred during the protests. The vast majority were determined to present “no criminal nexus or viable threat,” but a few remained open as cases with the Division of Criminal Investigation. Of the 78 actions made public, about 30 were directed at Democrats, a few less at Walker and other Republicans, and the balance consisted of vague or implied threats against no specific target, or concerns over demonstrators.[164 = w w w . jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/121721234.html]
[….]
One man tweeted that he prayed an anvil would fall from the sky onto Walker.

Here’s part of an email threat that DOJ released that went to Walker and 7 Republicans. DOJ found and ‘interviewed’ the writer, but from this and other local media accounts at the time, I got the impression they didn’t take it very seriously.
h t t p : / / waukesha.patch.com/articles/doj-finds-who-sent-death-threat-to-sen-zipperer .
We have all planned to assult you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head. However, this isn’t enough. We also have decided that this may not be enough to send the message. So we have built several bombs that we have placed in various locations around the areas in which we know that you frequent. This includes, your house, your car, the state capitol, and well I won’t tell you all of them because that’s just no fun. Since we know that you are not smart enough to figure out why this is happening to you we have decided to make it perfectly clear to you.

Here’s more on Ron Johnson’s recent claim, fwiw. Dunno who at which media added the sensible comment “(I think he meant to say every single Republican [….])”. However, the DOJ said the Democrats got more threats than the Republicans did; see my post above.

h t t p : / / w w w .wewantamericaback.net/site/?page_id=1562Senator Ron Johnson told an audience yesterday that every member of the Wisconsin legislature received death threats. The Daily Caller reported: (I think he meant to say every single Republican member of the Wisconsin legislature received death threats.) The Daily … Continue reading →

“It is also top of the list of wealthiest countries on the planet with a rich, homogenous population of, I believe, roughly 8 million.”
**********
And unless things have changed since I was last there, males of military age keep selective fire military rifles at their homes.

basil99, yeah, I was talking in general about Europe. It is also very expensive in Switzerland as we found out. For instance, we ate dinner at a Thai restaurant, two appetizers, one fried rice and guess how much it was — $70+, a similar PF Chang’s dinner would have been $25. OTH, $200 (for two) to Klein Matterhorn on three cable cars to about 4000m, to see Matterhorn surrounded by some 30+ other 4000m+ peaks was priceless. We didn’t ski but I have heard that they are very reasonable also.

This afternoon I went down to the lake to stretch my legs and to see if the water had warmed up enough to swim in without a wet suit–I hate wet suits.

I had a nice conversation with a young lady who came out from Ohio to attend medical school here–at the University of Washington, which is named for Senator Magnuson whom I spoke of earlier. It is a fine medical school in my opinion.

Then I went over to the usual spot where I go in and saw a big family of Samoans. They were not big Samoans–they were sort of minatures. Three of their kids–10-12 maybe, all boys were in the water kicking up a storm. A life jacket was floating in the water, and they were roughousing. No one else was swimming so I was curious.

I watched them for a moment to see if they were wearing wet suits–or just swimming trunks–so I would know whether it was warm enough yet. About all I could see was their heads. But then one of them stood up and they were wearing wet suits. To me that meant still too cold.

But all of a sudden a woman most likely their mother rushed up to me with a can in her hand and started screaming fuck you stop staring at them?

Say what I asked. I asked her if she had been drinking. She said it was pop. Stop staring. I said why? Stop staring. Well, it does not take much imagination to know what she was thinking. But she had no basis to think that–other than what had been planted in her head from watching too many To Catch A Predator msnbc specials.

There were half a dozen adult males in that group. Not only were they not upset, they were not even interested. But this young lady was pretty far gone. There was no room for reason.

Now it may well be that she has had some bad experience in the past either personally or with her boys that would trigger that sort of reaction. But I am betting not. I am also betting that she is an Obama supporter.

What do you do in a situation like that? I tried to explain the reason I was watching–or staring as she put it. No use. I told her she was acting hysterically and walked away. I thought about talking to one of the men about it, but decided what is the use. They have been programmed by big media, to see what is not even there.

Now then. Think about that same example in the context of the false allegations of racism also promulgated by the likes of msnbc. The cumulative effect of these sorts of allegation is to cause people to see land where there is no land. And that is the final verdict on what big media and Obama are doing to this country. I can think of no better example than the Zimmerman case.

it says [Kansas] courts, administrative agencies or state tribunals can’t base rulings on any foreign law or legal system that would not grant the parties the same rights guaranteed by state and U.S. constitutions.

========================

Things might get interesting along the border with Oklahoma, which iirc recently passed a law saying that all Oklahoma laws must cite the Magna Carta. 😉

Take this analysis a step further. In times past, every responsible adult took an interest in the children in the community, and looked out for them. If one of these kids had started to drown I would have gone in after him. But it seems we have gotten to the point in this society where a different perception has been created thanks to people like Phil Griffin, President of msnbc: any adult who pays any attention to your child is either a kidnapper, a child molester or both. I say when that that kind of perception becomes widespread, you no longer have a society, merely a war of all against all–which is the way Obama and big media wants it.

Put one more vote in the Wolfe (D) for president column here in Texas. I remained registered as a D just so that I could vote in this primary not for Bumbles. Note the low enthusiasm on the D side of things.

House lawmakers will consider an international proposal next week to give the United Nations more control over the Internet.

The proposal is backed by China, Russia, Brazil, India and other UN members, and would give the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) more control over the governance of the Internet.

It’s an unpopular idea with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in Congress, and officials with the Obama administration have also criticized it.

“We’re quite concerned,” Larry Strickling, the head of the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, said in an interview with The Hill earlier this year.

He said the measure would expose the Internet to “top-down regulation where it’s really the governments that are at the table, but the rest of the stakeholders aren’t.”

At a hearing earlier this month, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) also criticized the proposal. He said China and Russia are “not exactly bastions of Internet freedom.”

“Any place that bans certain terms from search should not be a leader in international Internet regulatory frameworks,” he said, adding that he will keep a close eye on the process.

Yet the proposal could come up for a vote at a UN conference in Dubai in December.

Next week’s hearing is expected to bring more attention in the U.S. to the measure, which would give the UN more control over cybersecurity, data privacy, technical standards and the Web’s address system. It would also allow foreign government-owned Internet providers to charge extra for international traffic and allow for more price controls.

The House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Communications and Technology will hold the hearing and hear testimony from Robert McDowell, a Republican commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC); David Gross, a former State Department official; and Sally Shipman Wentworth, the senior manager of public policy for the nonprofit Internet Society.

The Internet is currently governed under a “multi-stakeholder” approach that gives power to a host of nonprofits, rather than governments.

Strickling said that system brings more ideas and flexibility to Internet policymaking.

“We lose that when we turn this over to a group of just governments,” Strickling said.

In an op-ed earlier this year in The Wall Street Journal, McDowell warned that “a top-down, centralized, international regulatory overlay is antithetical to the architecture of the Net.”

“Productivity, rising living standards and the spread of freedom everywhere, but especially in the developing world, would grind to a halt as engineering and business decisions become politically paralyzed within a global regulatory body,” McDowell wrote.

He said some governments feel excluded from Internet policymaking and want more control over the process.

“And let’s face it, strong-arm regimes are threatened by popular outcries for political freedom that are empowered by unfettered Internet connectivity,” McDowell wrote.

Thanks NMF. My husband is afraid of heights but he did remarkably well considering the heights we scaled with especially the cable cars on this trip. He was also brave enough to go to the summit at Eiffel tower this time. About 25 years, he had refused to go up and it really had pissed me off, and I didn’t really understand what acrophobia meant in those days. Really proud of him to have overcome it.

I predicted months ago Jeb would surface as a nominee in 2012- Graham is a Bush puppet.. even though people say they don’t get along. Political expediency (and control)is/are the word/s for the day..
________________

Sen. Graham: Jeb Bush is best possible pick to be Romney’s running mate

Jeb Bush’s name keeps floating up in discussions about candidates to run on the ticket with Mitt Romney, despite Bush’s efforts to douse the talk.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) says Bush would most help Romney.

“He’d be an outstanding pick. It’s up to Gov. Romney but if I had to recommend a single person it would be Jeb,” Graham told The Hill.

Graham urged his party to unify behind Romney last month after Rick Santorum exited the GOP presidential primary. Graham is a close friend of Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the 2008 Republican presidential nominee.

Most of the focus has been on Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who are thought to be the leading contenders on Romney’s short list. But chatter is picking up on Capitol Hill that Bush could be a dark horse.

Senior political strategists think Bush could deliver Florida for Romney and help him among Hispanic and Catholic voters.

Bush fanned speculation last month when he told Newsmax, a conservative news site, “I’d consider it, but I doubt I’ll get a call and I don’t know if it’s the right thing for me to do.”

Bush has since tried to bury the notion that he might join the ticket.

“While the support is flattering, his decision has not changed. Gov. Bush will not be a candidate for VP,” said Jaryn Emhof, his spokeswoman.
_______________________

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback has signed a law aimed at keeping the state’s courts or government agencies from basing decisions on Islamic or other foreign legal codes, and a national Muslim group’s spokesman said Friday that a court challenge is likely.

The new law, taking effect July 1, doesn’t specifically mention Shariah law, which broadly refers to codes within the Islamic legal system. Instead, it says courts, administrative agencies or state tribunals can’t base rulings on any foreign law or legal system that would not grant the parties the same rights guaranteed by state and U.S. constitutions.

“This bill should provide protection for Kansas citizens from the application of foreign laws,” said Stephen Gele, spokesman for the American Public Policy Alliance, a Michigan group promoting model legislation similar to the new Kansas law. “The bill does not read, in any way, to be discriminatory against any religion.”

But supporters have worried specifically about Shariah law being applied in Kansas court cases, and the alliance says on its website that it wants to protect Americans’ freedoms from “infiltration” by foreign laws and legal doctrines, “especially Islamic Shariah Law.”

Brownback’s office notified the state Senate of his decision Friday, but he actually signed the measure Monday. The governor’s spokeswoman, Sherriene Jones-Sontag, said in a statement that the bill “makes it clear that Kansas courts will rely exclusively on the laws of our state and our nation when deciding cases and will not consider the laws of foreign jurisdictions.”

Muslim groups had urged Brownback to veto the measure, arguing that it promotes discrimination. Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, said a court challenge is likely because supporters of the measure frequently expressed concern about Shariah law.

Hooper said of Brownback, “If he claims it has nothing to do with Shariah or Islamic law or Muslims, then he wasn’t paying attention.”

Both the Washington-based council and the National Conference of State Legislatures say such proposals have been considered in 20 states, including Kansas. Gele said laws similar to Kansas’ new statute have been enacted in Arizona, Louisiana and Tennessee.

Oklahoma voters approved a ballot initiative in 2010 that specifically mentioned Shariah law, but both a federal judge and a federal appeals court blocked it.

There are no known cases in which a Kansas judge has based a ruling on Islamic law. However, supporters of the bill have cited a pending case in Sedgwick County in which a man seeking to divorce his wife has asked for property to be divided under a marriage contract in line with Shariah law.

Supporters argue the measure simply ensures that legal decisions will protect long-cherished liberties, such as freedom of speech and religion and the right to equal treatment under the law. Gele said the measure would come into play if someone wanted to enforce a libel judgment against an American from a foreign nation without the same free speech protections.

“It is perfectly constitutional,” he said.

The House approved the bill unanimously and the Senate, with broad, bipartisan support. Even some legislators who were skeptical of it believed it was broad and bland enough that it didn’t represent a specific political attack on Muslims.

“This disturbing recent trend of activist judges relying upon the laws of other nations has been rejected by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in both the Kansas House and Senate,” Jones-Sontag said.

The measure’s chief sponsor, Rep. Peggy Mast, an Emporia Republican, also has said all Kansans, including Muslims, should be comfortable with the new law, but she did not immediately respond Friday to telephone and email messages seeking comment.

Rep. Scott Schwab, an Olathe Republican, acknowledged that the measure merely “made some people happy” and that a vote against it could be cast politically as a vote in favor of Shariah law.

“Am I really concerned that Shariah law is going to take over the Kansas courts? No,” he said. “I’m more concerned about getting jobs to Kansas.”

The Michigan-based alliance advocates model “American Law for American Courts” legislation. Its website says, “America has unique values of liberty which do not exist in foreign legal systems, particularly Shariah Law.”

During the Kansas Senate’s debate on the bill earlier this month, Sen. Susan Wagle, a Wichita Republican described a vote for the measure as a vote for women’s rights, adding, “They stone women to death in countries that have Shariah law.”

Hooper said supporters of such proposals have made it clear they are targeting Islamic law.

“Underlying all of this is demonizing Islam and marginalizing American Muslims,” he said.

I hear the church which purchased Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral already wants to sell the opulent structure. I say it’s the perfect place for the likes of Barack Obama. If we could only convince enough people that he’s missed his calling.

GHWB –
The only unfortunate phrase I recall him making was this as he began an address to MIA families:
“Please shut up and sit down.”
I attributed it to foot in mouth disease, decided in my utter and inexcusable naivety back then, that he’d never make a good negotiator, therefore lacking a critical qualification for POTUS. That is how I began turning to WJC!

It’s been more recently for me that the press has provided the inappropriate comments attributed to him.

Frankly, I see no chance Jeb will emerge as a candidate in 2012. Only way that could have happened is if Romney tanked. Clearly, that is not happening. The one who is tanking now is Obama.

(Note: don’t you just love these AP analysis that say if Romney wins the same states McCain did in 2008 plus North Carolina then he would lose to Ogama by 63 electoral votes. These people are stuck on the static analysis of Texiera and 2008. They want to forget that 2010 ever happened–or that is was a defacto referendum on Obama even though he was not on the ballot.)

Simply put, there will be no brokered convention. If Poppy (GHWB) tried to push the Pillsbury doughboy (Jebediah)on the party, the response would be an emphatic: Jeb boy did not campaign in the primary, therefore he has no right to claim the crown. If you want further corroboration for this notice that Rove is backing Romney which means Poppy is backing Romney.

I will concede that there is some concern about the vp slot. It is remotely possible that Poppy will try to schlep Doughboy into the vp slot, or god forbid Condelessa Rice. The Bush name on a Republican ticket is box office poison. I doubt that will happen. Jeb has given Marco the nod, and others in the northeast–money men will be backing Christie. That is not to say there are not others–there are. But as of this writing, Marco and Chris appear to be the most likely choices. Time will tell.

David Letterman isn’t a partisan comic by choice. He simply follows the political material.

Yes, and when Letterman affixed himself to a wall via a velcro suit he was engaging in an intellectual exercise meant to deconstruct modern humor.

Letterman pretended to open up about political humor during a recent chat with old pal Regis Philbin.

LETTERMAN: Well – you – I know what your point is, and I have been guilty of appearing to be playing partisan politics. However, I’d just like to say that for the record, I am a registered independent. You go where the material takes you. Poor Bill Clinton. No president that I’m aware of got hammered harder than Bill – President Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky situation. We beat up on him. We still use him as a reference. And then we were desperate. We thought, well this was so easy and then we got George Bush, and within a matter of days we realized our prayers had been answered, he’s just as good in terms of material.

PHILBIN: (Laughing)

LETTERMAN: So we – it may appear that we have a slant one way or the other, but if a guy drops his dog, or a guy straps his dog to the roof of a car, or if a guy gets a shoe thrown at him, well this is where the material is going to be.

Interesting. Does Letterman know President Barack Obama once ate a dog and recounted the experience dispassionately in one of his two memoirs? Or that Obama’s team inserted the former senator into the online biographies of past presidents? Or that Obama claimed he was Kenyan in his literary biography for years? Or that Obama’s passion for pot rivaled Bob Marley’s?

The list, sadly, is endless. But Letterman has no interest in perusing said list. He’s a dedicated partisan who makes foolish statements like saying he pretends to follow the material.

Instead, he’s simply using his media platform as an in-kind contribution to the re-election of Obama. The fact that he isn’t honest about that simple truth is a stain on his broadcast legacy.

Marvin Frost–I always found the man detestable. He always has to drop the word President. A legend in his mind, Marty. You blowfish.

“By MARTIN FROST

The Obama reelection campaign is heavily focused on younger voters. But it needs to take a careful look at the other end of the age spectrum: voters 65 and older, particularly white seniors.

This was President Barack Obama’s weakest demographic in 2008. It could spell trouble for him in a close election, where white seniors are concentrated in swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa and Nevada.
————-
Ya sure, yabetcha. One could argue that President Barack (Hussein–don’t forget that part, Marty)has already “take(n) a careful look at the other end of the age spectrum: voters 65 and older, particularly white seniors. How? By proposing to cut medicare by half a trillion dollars. The only thing he has left to sell them now, Marty, is the sleeves off his vest. If that makes it a little uncomfortable for yellow dogs like you, Marty, it cannot be helped.

The Tea Party Patriots, the nation’s largest tea party organization, today blasted Vice President Biden and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for bashing ordinary Americans who believe in governmental fiscal responsibility.

Jenny Beth Martin, Co-founder and National Coordinator of Tea Party Patriots, reacted strongly to accusations that the Tea Party Movement bears responsibility for the financial crisis facing our nation:

“Only entrenched career politicians in Washington, D.C., would think living within your means is ‘extreme.’ What is truly extreme are the lengths Vice President Biden and Sen. Reid will go to blame everyone else for their lack of courage to lead this nation out of the financial wreckage they helped create. What is extreme is a Senate that refuses to pass a budget for three straight years. What is extreme is accelerating the nation’s financial troubles by refusing to cut government spending. What is extreme is a Congress, a President and a Vice President that don’t have the courage to lead this nation back to economic prosperity. Dysfunction and overspending is troubling and extreme.

The Vice President and Senator Reid are now screaming that Americans are ‘extremists’ for demanding fiscal responsibility. Is there a better example of how distorted and divisive this Administration and Congress have become in the national debate?

There used to be a time in America when spending money you didn’t have was frowned upon. Mr. Biden and Reid’s combined 64 years in Washington has clouded their ability to understand that a $15 trillion deficit and no budget is extreme mismanagement.”

The blame game is ramping up in DC to try and put the blame on us when Congress reaches its debt ceiling AGAIN without having done ANYTHING to stop the problems caused by its own dereliction of duty.

If placing the blame on an organization formed solely for the purpose of fixing government strikes you as extreme, please let us know you’re with us because it’s going to get pretty ugly before it gets pretty in DC.

I could not disagree more with Jeb Bush. After saying that he is the Bush with a little more IQ, but the boys are living out their father’s dream, not looking toward what is best for the nation – much like the Dimocrat now in office. W is why ObaMAO got so many votes from otherwise intelligent people. Personally me and my house will run, not walk, away from voting for Romney if Jeb is the VP. There is no love or trust in Romney, he is just milquetoast establishment all the way; if he wants my vote for sure, he will select a Paul Ryan or even better a Marco Rubio. A Jeb Bush would reignite the ‘horror’ of the W years.

Personally me and my house will run, not walk, away from voting for Romney if Jeb is the VP.
————————-
Correct. When I called the RNCC and told them I was through with the party because of Bush, take my name off the rolls, send my no more information, etc. they told me their phones were ringing so badly that they were tempted to take them off the hook. By the end of the process, Bush was down to 25% approval. You have already got a presidential candidate who is a real stretch for the conservative faction. To add Jeb to the ticket would cause the whole thing to implode–they will lose. Any republican strategist worth his salt will tell the powers that be that the voting public will hear the name Jeb and they will think George, and the Obamaites will dance in the street. I know Eric at Red State will push this, but this is one time I disagree with him. The best thing they can do for Jeb is give him the Secretary of Education job, because he is a good man and that is where his heart is. But as a vice presidential candidate, now, the name Bush is as I say box office poison.

The elder Bush and Barbara thought their favorite son Jeb was their rightful heir and want to see him get into the WH in their lifetime. They are wringing their hands that the screwy W screwed Jeb’s chance and their dreams for their favorite son. It would be too easy for Obama if Jeb is on the ticket. All he need to do is evoke Bush again and again, does not matter which Bush it is. He milked the Clinton fatigue in the primary 2008 and he will milk Bush fatigue if Jeb is on the ticket. Here I was thinking Rob Portman, an otherwise good VP candidate had too much of a Bush association.

Precedent has already been established with ObaMAO and Romney neither of which fit the Consitutional requirements and Romney gets a pass because of ObaMAO. The law, correct me if I am wrong, is now based on precedent and has been for quite some while; lawmakers routinely ignore or reinterpret for their own agenda the Constitution. I am not a lawyer, and have never played one on tv, but that is my understanding of how the legal system works now.

It is exactly as shortermers is saying. The old man wants Jeb to be vp, and I have no doubt he extacted some kind of a commitment from Romney to take a hard look at Jeb or Condelessa, and Poppy’s people have floated the idea in the press as a trial balloon, but the condition precedent is that the conditions are right. They are not. This is part of what held Christie and Rubio back before–but I think that has been lifted. When I say the old man–I mean both Poppy and the Battle-ax. In some respects, I think she runs the show–since his health is failing. Her comment about the people who lost everything in Katrina tells you where her heart is–and is not.

Silly, if you haven’t researched it. The primary reason his father as governor of NY could not run for the presidency.
………………

“The right-wing is nothing if not hypocritical. They have spent nearly 5 years claiming that Barack Obama is not a “natural-born citizen”; that he is not qualified to be president on the basis that his father was not born in this country. Even after demanding (and seeing) his official birth certificate, they have never been satisfied that he meets the qualifications, despite the fact that his mother was an American-born citizen. Why then, is the GOP now running two candidates – Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney – whose own circumstances are so similar?”

…snip…

“Mitt Romney’s father, George Romney, was born in Mexico. As with Aldo Santorum, we do not have sufficient evidence that Mitt Romney was born in the U.S.A. We have also never been provided with proof that Romney’s father was a legal immigrant. We do know that he and his family fled Mexico during the Mexican revolution; were they radical Mexican revolutionaries? Is Mitt Romney therefore a foreign-born radical like his Mexican father? As a possible illegal immigrant, should Mitt Romney even be allowed to vote, let alone run for president?

I can see the equation: essentially fatherless half black child vs lots of [fore]fathers rich white child. Not silly and will be in the back of the minds of a lot of people when they pull the lever in November, especially evangelicals. The most expedient way to counter that unspoken association would be to add a VP that is more palatable.

“google” is Romney a nbc.. there are thousands of sites with the same information. His father could not run for the presidency becase it was common knowledge in the 60s his father was not a natural born US Citizen.

The SCOTUS could surprise us in the Fall, saying the primary reason Obama’s HC is unconstitutional is because for one thing, after due consideration of the facts of Obama’s nbc status, all his offical actions up to this point have been declared by the SC to be null and void.

George Soros was seen falling down on his face in a heap while addressing a seminar representing CAP in NYC this Thursday afternoon. (just kidding)

When I called the RNCC and told them I was through with the party because of Bush, take my name off the rolls, send my no more information, etc. they told me their phones were ringing so badly that they were tempted to take them off the hook. By the end of the process, Bush was down to 25% approval.

===================

When did you leave the GOP, I’ve forgotten? I was shocked that Bush was re-elected in 2004.

wbboei
May 27th, 2012 at 1:45 pm
————
I agree. One obscure link is not research. What I don’t understand is without hard evidence why would anybody spread that kind of misinformation? Especially if you want Obama to lose. Of course, Obots would and it could be the same spurious articles linked multiple times here and there. There was a recent article where a reporter traveled to Mexico and interviewed a bunch of people some Romney’s relatives still living there. The article was complementary to Romneys. The elder Romney lost out on the run for presidency because of a gaffe and not his purported NBC status. In fact it may even be an Obot invention just like they tried to make McCain’s birth an NBC issue. Also, Americans have come a long way in accepting Mormans than during George Romney’s time.

Obama’s serial assaults on the Constitution get zero air time from big media (except a minor notation on CBS). They have become a mouthpiece for a totalitarian regime. The comparision between them and Goebbles is not nearly as far fetched as it may seem at first blush. This missing of the boat was not a simple mistake. It was 100% intentional–yet another big media act of censorship.
————————-
The archbishop of Washington on Sunday accused the network news programs of having “missed the boat” by largely ignoring lawsuits filed this past week by Catholic institutions challenging the Obama administration’s so-called contraception mandate.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl, speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” was responding to an analysis by the conservative Media Research Center of how the networks’ evening newscasts treated coverage of the dozen federal lawsuits filed Monday. According to the center, CBS spent 19 seconds on the story after it broke, while the other networks gave it no coverage.

“It is puzzling, particularly since they’re focusing so much attention right now on the pope’s butler,” Wuerl said, in reference the scandal in which the pope’s butler Paolo Gabriele was charged with stealing sensitive documents and is suspected of leaking them.

Wuerl adamantly defended the lawsuits, which were filed by dozens of Catholic-affiliated institutions including schools, charities and the Archdiocese of Washington.

Asked about speculation that the suits were just a vehicle for conservative members of the church to go after President Obama — considering dozens of dioceses did not join the suit — Wuerl said the Catholic community is unified.

“I have yet to see among the bishops any split at all,” he said.

The contraception mandate was originally a requirement on religious-affiliated institutions to provide access to free contraceptive coverage, as part of the federal health care overhaul. After outcry from Catholic leaders, the administration tweaked the rule so that insurers would be responsible for providing that coverage directly.

The Obama administration argues in defense of the rule by noting that almost 99 percent of women have used contraception and many struggle with the cost, and that a majority of states already require insurance to cover birth control.

Wuerl, though, said this has never been applied at the federal level. “This whole lawsuit isn’t about contraception. It’s about religious freedom,” he said.

He also challenged the administration’s “accommodation” to religious groups, noting that many archdioceses are self-insured.

wbboei
May 27th, 2012 at 1:45 pm
————
I agree. One obscure link is not research. What I don’t understand is without hard evidence why would anybody spread that kind of misinformation? Especially if you want Obama to lose.
———
Just so you understand. Mrs. Smith and I are personal friends. That is not the thrust of what I was saying. I think we need to see the evidence against our position, evaluate it, and decide what to do. But we do not want to shoot the messenger. Mrs. Smith is on the side of the angels.

Asked about speculation that the suits were just a vehicle for conservative members of the church to go after President Obama — considering dozens of dioceses did not join the suit — Wuerl said the Catholic community is unified.

Archbishop said on Fox:The archbishop of Washington on Sunday accused the network news programs of having “missed the boat” by largely ignoring lawsuits filed this past week by Catholic institutions challenging the Obama administration’s so-called contraception mandate. [….]
Asked about speculation that the suits were just a vehicle for conservative members of the church to go after President Obama — considering dozens of dioceses did not join the suit — Wuerl said the Catholic community is unified.
“I have yet to see among the bishops any split at all,” he said.

===============

TDO:
So, according to him, the bishops ARE the Catholic community. (Never mind that most Catholics use birth control, disagree with the bishops on this in their blogs, etc.)

Sorry I quoted you. I didn’t need your backing to say what I wanted to say and I stand by what I said. You have gone after people who have published stuff here that you think would help Obama. And this kind of misinformation about Romney’s family history will help Obama, especially if it involves spreading some Obot links. It is not something I would encourage and I will point out counter information or lack of evidence for the information presented with or without your support.

I think we need to see the evidence against our position, evaluate it, and decide what to do.

===================

Yes. I’d like to make a distinction between stuff that’s already pretty widely out and being pushed as talking points (such as this Romney father Mexico stuff or the ‘democracy/republic’ stuff) — and topics that have not been researched, which we’d better not open.

I expect any savvy politician will infiltrate the editor clique of his Wikipedia biography long before the opposition gets around to it. Check the ‘talk’ link at the top of the page to see some of what may have been going on.

turndownobama, I stepped away from my PC for a while and swear to God was just thinking to myself a few minutes ago, “I bet turndown will say something cynical about the Romney Wikipedia entry.” You are so predictable. You really don’t fool anyone with your little winky smiley faces (condescending) and feigned interest in others’ comments. Obviously you just seek to provoke anger and challenge others. Lame.

I’m sure the Romney team helped fill out the Wikipedia entry but I am not aware of anything there that is factually inaccurate but if there is, I am sure someone will point it out.

Truebearing says:
It appears Obama was into parasitism way back in high school, proudly mooching other people’s reefer like he was entitled to it. Remember folks, “Choom” is just “mooch” spelled backwards.

Here is the contrast. Elder Romney and his fore-fathers were persecuted and had to leave the country and go to Mexico. When it was safe to come back here they did, may be because they loved this country and wanted to be here. Notice the lack of resentment about the persecution. Romney’s dad started with nothing and built himself an American dream, provided well for his family and others. In the reporter’s story I read, Romneys have had a huge impact on the Morman community still in Mexico — they tried to assimilate with the locals, learned the language and help their adopted communities.

Obama’s dad was given a huge opportunity to come to this wonderful country and make himself of something, with scholarship to Harvard, no less. What did he do? Impregnated a 17-18 year old while being married to another woman back home and left the pregnant wife and abandoned the kid and went on to impregnate another woman who unlike Obama’s mom perhaps wanted to hold him accountable, stuck with him and even went back to Kenya with him. What else did he do after having gone back to Kenya? Became an alcoholic and killed himself.

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.
See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly.
I’m crying.

Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the van to come.
Corporation tee-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday.
Man, you been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob.

Mister City Policeman sitting
Pretty little policemen in a row.
See how they fly like Lucy in the Sky, see how they run.
I’m crying, I’m crying.
I’m crying, I’m crying.

Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog’s eye.
Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess,
Boy, you been a naughty girl you let your knickers down.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob.

Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun.
If the sun don’t come, you get a tan
From standing in the English rain.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob g’goo goo g’joob.

Expert textpert choking smokers,
Don’t you thing the joker laughs at you?
See how they smile like pigs in a sty,
See how they snied.
I’m crying.

Judging by the Happersett decision and most interpretations of the eligibility clause, a president’s parents would only have to be citizens of the U.S. at the time of his or her birth, not natural-born citizens.

Therefore, even if George W. Romney’s birth in Mexico disqualified him from being a natural-born citizen, Mitt Romney could be a natural-born citizen, because his father was a citizen when his son was born.

Opponents of George W. Romney’s presidential candidacy in 1968 argued that his grandparents had renounced their U.S. citizenship when they went to Mexico, but there is no evidence for that. Nor was it considered necessary for George W. Romney to become naturalized to be a U.S. citizen after he was brought to the United States for the first time when he was 5 years old.

Moreover, decades after George W. Romney was brought to the U.S. by his parents, the Nationality Act of 1940, Section 201, 54 Stat. 1137, specifically provided that a child born outside the limits and jurisdiction of the United States is a U.S. citizen, provided the father or mother, or both, at the time of the birth of the child is a U.S. citizen.

No debate of any importance can be found in the public record challenging George W. Romney’s citizenship in 1963, when he first ran to be Michigan’s 43rd governor.

Thus, according to the constitution of the State of Michigan, George W. Romney had to be a U.S. citizen to be Michigan’s governor.

In 1968, when he decided to run for president, the only serious debate at the time was whether George W. Romney was a natural-born citizen under Article 2, Section 1, not whether or not he was a U.S. citizen.

Mitt Romney, then, was born on March 12, 1947, in Detroit, Mich., to two U.S. citizen parents – George W. Romney and Lenore Emily LaFount; LaFount was a U.S. citizen, born on Nov. 9, 1908, in Logan, Utah.

Thus, according to the constitution of the State of Michigan, George W. Romney had to be a U.S. citizen to be Michigan’s governor.

In 1968, when he decided to run for president, the only serious debate at the time was whether George W. Romney was a natural-born citizen under Article 2, Section 1, not whether or not he was a U.S. citizen.

Mitt Romney, then, was born on March 12, 1947, in Detroit, Mich., to two U.S. citizen parents – George W. Romney and Lenore Emily LaFount; LaFount was a U.S. citizen, born on Nov. 9, 1908, in Logan, Utah.

In 1968, when he decided to run for president, the only serious debate at the time was whether George W. Romney was a natural-born citizen under Article 2, Section 1, not whether or not he was a U.S. citizen.
_________________

Romney’s father became a Naturalized citizen when Romney was about 7 yrs old. It means that Romney’s father was a Mexican citizen at the time of his birth. Even so, both parents would have had to have been US citizens at the time of Mitt’s birth. aAs was proven by McCain. His father was not natural born. He because a naturalized citizen years after Mitts birth and that does count. So, he doesn’t qualify as a Natural Born citizen. And that IS the reason why Romney’s father couldn’t run for US President.

From the article: Judging by the Happersett decision and most interpretations of the eligibility clause, a president’s parents would only have to be citizens of the U.S. at the time of his or her birth, not natural-born citizens.

In this nation of immigrants, it would have ruled out a huge cross section of the population in the early years of this nation’s founding, if the president’s parents had to be natural-born citizens also. The same situation is again becoming relevant with jet-driven mobility of new immigrants taking root here — case in point Jindal, Rubio, and may be Haley. It would be interesting to see how this will get resolved.

Pm
Yes, your photos are wonderful.
When I was in Geneva, many moons ago my friend threw a fit because I started to walk on the grass in a park. He said it was against the law, beauty was for looking not touching.
Too strict there for my liking.

Thanks, Shadowfax. Funny you should make that same point. We were discussing similar topics on the trip. Conformity by force or shame is one of the features of life there (in general most of Europe) and it gets worse as you move eastward into Asia and South and Southeast Asia. People don’t know how good they have it here.

That’s not the way I’m interpreting it. Romney’s grandparents and parents were U.S. citizens who never gave up their citizenship. Mitt Romney’s father was brought back into the U.S. at the age of 5 (1912).

A Congressional Research Service report published in November comes closest to answering that question.
“There have been legitimate legal issues raised concerning those born outside of the country to U.S. citizens,” the report states. “The weight of legal and historical authority indicates that the term ‘natural born’ citizen would mean a person who is entitled to U.S. citizenship ‘by birth’ or ‘at birth,’ either by being born ’in’ the United States and under its jurisdiction, even those born to alien parents; by being born abroad to U.S. citizen-parents; or by being born in other situations meeting legal requirements for U.S. citizenship ‘at birth.’”

Romney was born to American citizens living in a Mormon church colony in Chihuahua, Mexico.
Even though he wasn’t born in a United States territory or state, George Romney was given citizenship at birth because he was born to American citizens, essentially granting him the status of a natural-born citizen.
“When you’re born outside the United States to [U.S.] citizens, you have citizenship at birth,” explained Peter J. Spiro, a professor of law and an expert on the law of citizenship at Temple University. “You don’t have to do anything to claim your citizenship. You are a citizen from birth.”

You notice the above says “by being born abroad to U.S. citizen-parents.” I interpret that to mean that even if Mitt Romney’s father was born in Mexico he was a U.S. citizen because he was born from parents who were U.S. citizens. I’ve been looking on many, many websites for the past few months because other people have made the comment that Mitt Romney isn’t eligible to run for President under the claim his father wasn’t a natural born citizen but all sources agree that there is no clarification in the U.S. Constitution about what a natural born citizen really means.

You can interpret whatever sources you use any way you like about what it means to be a natural born citizen but since even Constitutional scholars can’t agree on the argument, I’ll choose to believe Mitt Romney is natural born. We can agree to disagree.

From the article: why they fled the USWhen the first settlers arrived here[Mexico] in the 1870s and ’80s, some were fleeing a U.S. crackdown on polygamy. (The practice ended after a 1904 LDS edict that polygamists would be excommunicated.)

I forget where I read this. But there was a human side to this crackdown and why they fled. Romney’s grandparents and people like them — what were they supposed to do? Ditch one of the wives? Which one? What would the wife do? What would their children do? Social change is not easy.

I read Loughman’s law review pdf in 08′ when she was working to make the case for Barack Obama’s citizenship status. Her writing was inconclusive. Everyone seems to have their own interpretation of what qualifies as Natural Born Citizen status. The longer time goes on the more bloviated the definition becomes… When the word foreign.. comes into play… theres a big red flag.

““When you’re born outside the United States to [U.S.] citizens, you have citizenship at birth,” explained Peter J. Spiro, a professor of law and an expert on the law of citizenship at Temple University. “You don’t have to do anything to claim your citizenship. You are a citizen from birth.”
__________

If this is so, then why did McCain need a court ruling as to his NBC status? Both of his parents were natural born US citizens at the time of his birth. McCain was born in a military hospital in or near the Suez Canal Zone. He had to get a legal determination stating he is considered a nbc before he filled out his application for the job of US President.

And in that article they state Rubio does not qualify for VP or the presidency.

Iirc from my research some time ago re the Romney’s and natural born citizenship:
– Utah was a territory at time time the Romney’s fled to Mexico because polygamy was about to be illegal, that brings to question if they were U S Citizens even then as territorial residents did not get citizenship until the territory became a state
– the state of Utah allowed one to maintain Territorial Citizenship, but they had to apply and be accepted for such; I found no evidence that the Romney family had done such. It may exist but I was not able to find it.
– George did not become a naturalized citizen until after Mitt was born; the requirement that parents must be citizens at the moment of birth for a child to be a natural born citizen was not attained, so while Mitt is a citizen, he is not natural born
– the Romney’s returned to the US at the advent of the Mexico war

If I understand correctly: precedent was set when ObaMAO was allowed to assume the office of the POTUS, there has been no definitive court ruling on his nbc status, and though there have been questions there has been no legal opinion that has rendered him ineligible….even though there are a lot of citizens who do not believe him to be a natural born citizen. And he would be hard pressed to prove that he is a nbc; either way he lied repeatedly. There is no way to track records for him to verify or not verify; so he skated through on that one; but dollars to doughnuts He will not allow Mitt or Rubio to skate through without proof; and it seems apparent that Mitt could not prove he is a nbc in a court of law, but he could site ObaMAO as a precedent. So, it is my opinion that Rubio is not to be challenged when Mitt and ObaMAO both do not meet the necessary requirements. That is my opinion, based on my own research, and I am sticking to it.

He asked her, “Your Majesty, how do you run such an efficient government? Is there any advice you can give to me?”

“Well,” said the Queen, “the most important thing is to surround yourself with intelligent people.” Obama frowned, and then asked, “But how do I know the people around me are really intelligent?”

The Queen took a sip of tea. “Oh, that’s easy; you just ask them to answer an intelligent riddle.” The Queen pushed a button on her intercom. “Please find Tony Blair and send him here, would you?”

After a little while Tony Blair walked into the room and said, “Yes, Your Majesty?” The Queen smiled and said, “Answer me this please Tony, your mother and father have a child. It’s not your brother and it’s not your sister. Who is it?” Without pausing for a moment, Tony Blair answered, “That would be me.” “Yes! Very good,” said the Queen.

When Obama went back home he asked Joe Biden, his vice president, the same question. “Joe, answer this for me.
Your mother and your father have a child. It’s not your brother and it’s not your sister. Who is it?” “I’m not sure,” said Biden “Let me get back to you on that one….”

He went to his advisors and asked every one, but none could give him an answer. Finally, he ran into Sarah Palin in a restaurant one night. Biden asked, “Sarah, can you answer this for me? Your mother and father have a child and it’s not your brother or your sister. Who is it?” Sarah Palin answered back immediately, “That’s easy, it’s me!” Biden smiled, and said, “Thanks!”

Then, he went back to speak with Obama. “Say, I did some research and I have the answer to that riddle. It’s Sarah Palin!”

Obama got up, stomped over to Biden, and angrily yelled into his face, “No! You fool, don’t you know anything? It’s Tony Blair.’

As much as I like what Jerome Corsi along with Trump had to say about his bombshell research on Obama’s citizenship eligibility…it never materialized or at least, I have not read anything that would disqualify Obama’s long form birth certificate except for the research done by computer verifications stating the LR BC is a fraud.. I would not hold my breath about Romney.. just because people wish it to be so… He would have had to go through the process in court as McCain did for a legal determination and for the outcome to be favorable to his specific scenario.

If I understand correctly: precedent was set when ObaMAO was allowed to assume the office of the POTUS, there has been no definitive court ruling on his nbc status, and though there have been questions there has been no legal opinion that has rendered him ineligible…
___________

How can it be a precedent if the case never went to court and a legal determination was made allowing the precedent?

Every time a “Bilderberg Meeting” takes place, important things happen. The last time they met in the US was an election year, 2008 – and the world got Obama. This year they’re back in the US: will they decide who the next president of the United State

­When in 2008 they gathered from June 5 to 8 in Chantilly, Virginia – just a stone’s throw from the Washington DC – Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were neck-in-neck in the battle for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidacy.

On June 5 of that year, Barack and Hillary mysteriously “disappeared” for some hours “somewhere in the DC area.” Their agendas blocked out, they clearly sneaked off to “Meet the Bilderbergers.”

The media kept mum about that, save for an Associated Press report on the campaign trail saying that, “reporters traveling with Obama sensed something might be happening between the pair (i.e. Obama and Hillary) when they arrived at Dulles International Airport after an event in Northern Virginia and Obama was not aboard the airplane. Asked at the time about the Illinois Senator’s whereabouts, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs smiled and declined to comment.” (The AP dispatch “Obama and Clinton meet, discuss uniting Democrats” is, strangely, “no longer available” on their website).

Be that as it may, two days later, Hillary withdrew from the race and Obama became the presidential candidate. Did Bilderberg make Hillary “an offer she couldn’t refuse” to clear the way for Obama to the White House? Did they promise her that she would become his Secretary of State?

It is a ‘precedent’ it just has not been used in court….yet. And just because the powers that be do not question the nbc consideration, does not mean that citizens have to accept it. Would it not be interesting to see ObaMAO have to prove he is a citizen? It would be interesting to see what Romney and ObaMAO submitted if there was such a requirement;I am not certain if McCain submitted it to shut them up, or if he was required to; does anyone know the answer to that question? At any rate if McCain was required to submit proof of nbc, then why aren’t they all? I would love to see all their submissions.

I stand corrected; the legal definition of a precedent is one created by a court decision. The court has not decided on a precedent, yet, but could use it in the future.
______________

Thanks- I was beginning to wonder what planet we were on maintaining why the meaning of words are so important when it comes to legal cases that have been won and lost on the merits of using the wrong words i.e. ‘the’ and ‘a’.. to have specific meanings by definition alone.

As I was coming home from the store, I had another thought.. as a hypothetical. If by chance the voter count in Spain designates Obama as the loser, I would bet my bottom dollar, Obama’s plan B would be to use a challange to Romney’s citizenship issue to disqualify him.

If nothing else, Team Obama have so many organizational tentacles sniffing out dirt and anomolies to use against their known and perceived opponents running as smoothly as a Swiss watch.. Then again you have Chicago, the bastion of corruption and on the International front you have Soros, the UN and the IMF covering all the bases both domestic and global.

I don’t think if Romney was ineligible to run for the Presidency because of a natural born citizen status Obama would wait until after he lost the election to challenge him on it. Look at Al Gore’s challenge. It went nowhere. Look at all the challenges Obama has endured after he won the election and it hasn’t done a bit of good. We know for sure Obama isn’t a natural born citizen because his father was Kenyan and not born in the U.S. and it just didn’t seem to matter to anyone.

I don’t think with Obama’s huge, unboundless ego, he would wait until after he lost to use everything at his disposal to get rid of Romney. He would have done it by now.

It is a ‘precedent’ it just has not been used in court….yet. And just because the powers that be do not question the nbc consideration, does not mean that citizens have to accept it. Would it not be interesting to see ObaMAO have to prove he is a citizen? It would be interesting to see what Romney and ObaMAO submitted if there was such a requirement;I am not certain if McCain submitted it to shut them up, or if he was required to; does anyone know the answer to that question? At any rate if McCain was required to submit proof of nbc, then why aren’t they all? I would love to see all their submissions.
_______________

I did a month’s worth of research on the citizenship issue in 08′ and was familiar with the Christina Lohman article.. where to me she was a paid hack looking for ways to couch the Obama citizenship issue casting her opinion of his eligibility in a favorable light. Yet in the end- she was factually inconclusive..

Then I read minutes of the First and Second Continental Congress and the Federalist Papers. How it was to be determined who was a suitable candidate for the presidency. (however, a designate with a title for the job was never established at that time. And to date, a specific person or committee has never been appointed to the job of verification of a presidential candidate’s nb birth status.) So, all that remains is that the candidate be of good moral character, a Natural Born citizen and of a proper age to preside and govern the new emerging government. Jefferson and Madison laid out a structure for the new government as an outline with input from their fellow framers trying to nail down specifics from what they had learned along the way from other established governments… a good explanation of NBC is here:

Maybe-maybe not. You can’t say that for sure because it hasn’t been addressed by either side. However, for now, what we do know is… they are letting sleeping dogs lie and not broaching the topic publicly. The best we can hope for is Romney has attorneys and a few Judges working on the case with good, sound legal arguments should it come up in the future. At least that is what smart people do when there is a serious dilemma looming overhead that could be problematic in the not to distant future.

In sum, Obama’s campaign right now feels as though it were made in a test tube by political consultants. It’s not the Obama we admire. Rather than pounding the country with “I have a plan” — a rebuilding stimulus plus Simpson-Bowles — which would be an Obama-like message of hope, leadership and unity that would put him on higher ground that Romney can’t reach because of the radical G.O.P. base, Obama is selling poll-tested wedge issues. I don’t think it’s a winner for him or America.

From the article:
” Judging by the Happersett decision and most interpretations of the eligibility clause, a president’s parents would only have to be citizens of the U.S. at the time of his or her birth, not natural-born citizens. ”

In this nation of immigrants, it would have ruled out a huge cross section of the population in the early years of this nation’s founding, if the president’s parents had to be natural-born citizens also.

=================

Makes sense. And ISTR Spiro being quoted as saying that the NBC requirement could be satisfied by being born in the US, OR born to US parents anywhere. You didn’t have to be born in the US to US parents, and certainly not to parents who were born in the US.

Iirc this was what the judge who did hear the case on its merits ruled according to.

I’m sure the Romney team helped fill out the Wikipedia entry but I am not aware of anything there that is factually inaccurate but if there is, I am sure someone will point it out.

=======================

How familiar are you with Wikipedia’s procedure? Normally there is some time lag between when someone enters a ‘fact’ and when someone else challenges it, than another lag till the article’s de facto editor makes some decision. The passage can be ‘reverted’ back and forth several times. Sometimes one or more ‘editors’ will decide to freeze or ‘protect’ the article.

So if the de facto ‘editor’ is a supporter of the candidate, how will you know that anyone has tried to “point out” an error? You won’t learn it from the Wikipedia page itself. You might try reading the article several days to see if it’s repeated, or looking on the “Talk” page (assuming the editors don’t change that also).

The only way to find out if a claim is false, is to look it up in other sources outside Wikipedia. Of course Wikipedia’s footnotes are a good place to start.

It’s naive to assume that Wikipedia is much more pure and uncorruptable than MSM, at least on controversial subjects, when one side has enough money to hire sockpuppets.

———-
Wasn’t that the time that Diane Feinstein arranged for Hillary and the Fraud to meet at her place in DC, where it is rumored that Barry asked Hillary to be his VP and she said ‘No!’? Not sure if the SOS position was offered or if Hillary may have said it was the only job she would take in is cabinet, because it would keep her out of his political bun kissing area.

Young Arthur Schultzberg is a moral degenerate. Last time we checked he was spending quality time with Caroline while married. Now he has got a new light of love, and naturally she works for him. In any other company this would be verbotten because he has set the company up for a multi million dollar claim of sexual harassment when they finally spit the sheets. If I were his insurer I would not be happy about this. But Punch, aka daddy warbux seems to have no problem with it. After all, it does confirm the familiar pattern where the partiarch makes the money (actually he married the daughter of the Occhs family who owned it before), the next generation manages it as best it can (that would be Punch)manages it as best they can with their diminishing capabilities, and finally the third generation spoiled to a fault and no capabilities runs the gray lady into a rock. And that would be young Arthur–little boy blue. With Sapphire gone, name me one conservative working for that newspaper–and don’t say Brooks. No wonder they turn out such drivel.

This just sent to me via e-mail… is SOOOOO Good..
Should be extremely damaging to Obama’s presidential image.. At this rate we could buy a book a week detailing an expose on Obama as the ‘Pot Head President.’ .. The vetting comes now after 4 yrs of living in the darkness and insecurity of a spiraling nightmare? a must read..
_____________

The Choom Gang: President Obama’s pot-smoking high school days detailed in Maraniss book-

short excerpt: (with 5 accessible links @ main link)

“Political blogs went to pot on Friday.

The Internet is buzzing after the Washingtonian published a review of Washington Post associate editor David Maraniss’s forthcoming book “Barack Obama: The Story,” including an excerpt about President Obama’s high school clique and their favorite pastime.

Let’s just say jobs weren’t the president’s first green initiative. The group of friends smoked marijuana frequently enough to nickname themselves the “Choom Gang.”

But enough of my bad weed puns. Here’s what other blogs are writing about the excerpts.

Yahoo: Bill Clinton he was not.

BuzzFeed has a handy “User’s Guide To Smoking Pot With Barack Obama” compiled from excerpts in Maraniss’s book.

Time’s post is titled the “Audacity of Dope.”

And NPR has “Inhale to the chief”

ABC’s Jonathan Karl reminds us Obama has previously written about his drug use:

In his 1995 memoir “Dreams of My Father,” Obama writes about smoking pot almost like Dr. Seuss wrote about eating green eggs and ham. As a high school kid, Obama wrote, he would smoke “in a white classmate’s sparkling new van,” he would smoke “in the dorm room of some brother” and he would smoke “on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids.”

After what we’ve seen Obama do these last 4+ years, why does anyone care, within the context of Jeremiah Wright, what’s “fair game”?
#############################
Well, I’m off.
Wishing all here a meaningful Memorial Day.

I think there were a lot of young people who dismissed the drug use, as their generation seems to think it is harmless. Why do you think O has so much trouble remembering basic facts and dealing with speaking without a teleprompter. Hexx he cannot even speak with a telepromter. He obviously has problems with recall, and maintaining his thoughts. I don’t think people want to think about this.

You should be very careful about electing to office a person who has participating in mind altering drug use. Do you really want that person answering the 3 a.m. phone call? I have had this discussion before with people that feel that recreational drugs are harmless.

Regardless of what the younger generation thinks, what you do to your body can have consequences, and some of them are long term.

@Althouse:In fact, what bugs me the most about lefties — what motivates me to go after lefties much more than righties on this blog — is they way they set themselves up as the good people and prance and stomp all over the place shaming and blaming the people who won’t agree with them. Having lived in Madison for the last quarter century, I am fed up with their domineering bullshit.

Perfect. This is exactly what has happened to me in the last 5 years and especially after watching the Democratic Primary 2008 closely. There is a notion that righties are hillbillies which absolves them of their ignorance. But the lefties with their arrogance and exalted self need to know better to deserve what they think of themselves.

Public Schedule: Public Schedule for May 30, 2012
05/30/2012 08:19 AM EDT

Public Schedule for May 30, 2012

Public Schedule
Washington, DC

May 30, 2012

DEPARTMENT OF STATE
PUBLIC SCHEDULE
WEDNESDAY MAY 30, 2012

SECRETARY HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON

Secretary Clinton is on foreign travel to Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkey through June 7. The Secretary is accompanied by Assistant Secretary Gordon, Counselor and Chief of Staff Mills, Director Sullivan, VADM Harry B. Harris, Jr., JCS, and Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and Senior Director for European Affairs Liz Sherwood Randall. Please click here for more information.